I am a graduate student in the Mathematical, Computational and Systems Biology program at UCI. I’m in both the Nie and Atwood labs, studying cancer-immune system interactions using a variety of different tools such as scRNAseq, mathematical modeling and in vivo mice experiments. You can follow me on Github and LinkedIn. Check out my Successes and Papers on the sidebar.
Research.
The immune system is intrinsically linked to oncogenesis, tumor growth and metastasis. We and others have found that tumors from different cancers all contain the same immune cell types (with different relative ratios), but certain cancers are more immunogenic, more sensitive to immuno-therapy, and others are not. The reasons for these differences between cancers are not the presence or absence of immune cells, but the differential communications within the immune system and between the immune system and cancers. My main research is focused on immune communication in the tumor microenvironment.
I am question-driven, not methods-driven: I use a wide variety of methods including single-cell transcriptomics (e.g. Seurat, Harmony, SoptSC), mouse experiments (e.g. drug treatments, single cell sequencing, H&E staining) and mathematical modeling (e.g. continuum dynamic modeling, network modeling).