Monica Cassandras: Evolving and Adapting as a Grad Student

As a graduate student (Biological and Biomedical Sciences (BBS) program, G6) in the Agudo lab, Monica Cassandras shares her mentor’s passion for figuring out the puzzles of cellular and molecular biology that come together to influence patient outcomes. But her interest in science didn’t begin at the level of the cell. As a child, she traveled a lot, including a memorable trip to the Galapagos. Here, her middle-school self became captivated by the concept of evolution–witnessing how the creatures of the unique island landscapes adapted over time to their changing environment. She began to wonder, “what are the pressures that cause things to change?” This question has remained at the core of Monica’s scientific journey thus far. 

As an undergraduate, Monica majored in molecular and cellular biology with a minor in anthropology. This combination of coursework gave her the dual perspectives of how humans are shaped molecularly by genetics and anthropologically by societal pressures. In her undergraduate lab, she worked on mechanisms of RNA silencing in tobacco plants, looking at changes in response to infection. Although this experience confirmed her desire to pursue wet lab research, she felt that she hadn’t found her scientific niche quite yet, prompting her to take on a research technician role in a field completely new to her. In the lab of Dr. Tien Peng at The University of California San Francisco she studied epithelial-mesenchymal cell interactions during lung tissue repair in mouse models of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. It was in this setting of performing basic biology research and witnessing organ-level outcomes (when she administered drugs to the mice she could see for herself the direct effects in the lungs) where she fell in love with science. Here she realized, in line with the advice she received from a grad student in the lab, “once you start dreaming about your project, then you know that you are ready for grad school.”

With this newfound inspiration, Monica started graduate school as part of the BBS program at Harvard Medical School, where, after coming across Dr. Judith Agudo’s name over and over again (despite initial hesitation about studying immunology), she rotated and eventually joined the lab. Her project focuses on how breast cancer cells evade immune system detection during early metastasis to the lung, and how this process can be targeted therapeutically. Though immune cell evasion and metastasis might seem distant from her undergraduate pursuits in plant biology and anthropology, she finds it remarkably similar. “You have a cell going throughout the body and it’s getting attacked by all of these immune cells that want to kill it,” and you want to know, “how is it changing, what does it need to change and why? It’s a sort of micro version of anthropologic evolution.”

Like the organisms evolving to the landscapes of the Galapagos, the lungs responding to injury, and cancer cells evading immune detection, Monica has learned to adapt and change in response to her own environment throughout grad school. This included a challenging year of negative data, leading to the tough decision to put her main project on hold. During this year, Dr. Agudo’s support and dedication to Monica’s growth as a student became apparent. Dr. Agudo, “will evolve to whatever a person needs,” on an individual basis and over time as each trainee progresses through their time in the lab. As Monica began pivoting her project, however, she and Dr. Agudo kept coming back to her initial data, eventually reaching the conclusion that the models were not optimized to answer the types of questions they wanted to ask. With a new model in hand and a few months of data later, the positive results began cascading in, forming what is now the main component of her thesis project.

Her time as a graduate student in Dr. Agudo’s lab is the intersection of Monica’s scientific curiosities and personal motivations. She has been able to foster her childhood curiosity for understanding how things change and evolve in response to their surroundings and build off of the work that ignited her love for the mechanistic intricacies of cell-cell interactions, applying these foundations to uncover novel biology that can be translated to meaningful impacts in the lives of patients with cancer.

Since the writing of this article, Monica has successfully defended her PhD!