Funded Research: 2022

Dr. Nicole JamesAssistant Professor of Research

Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology
Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University

Nicole James is a translational scientist studying ovarian cancer molecular therapeutics. In 2018 she completed her PhD in the Pharmaceutical Sciences program at the University of Rhode Island, with a concentration in Pharmacology & Toxicology. Her pre-doctoral work centered upon elucidating the role of the biomarker HE4 in the pathogenesis of ovarian cancer. During her post-doctoral fellowship at Women & Infants Hospital in the Program in Women’s Oncology, she continued to pursue ovarian cancer research, employing intratumoral immune profiling techniques to uncover predictive markers indicative of improved clinical outcomes. As an assistant professor (research), her work now focuses upon identifying novel immune signatures that can predict chemotherapy response and patient survival outcomes, which can ultimately be leveraged to produce more efficacious and personalized treatment regimens for ovarian cancer patients.

Dr. Sanghoon Lee
Associate Professor

Department of Gynecologic Oncology and Reproductive Medicine
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas

Dr. Lee earned his Ph.D. and M.S. in Animal Molecular Genetics from Chungnam National University in South Korea. He completed a postdoctoral research fellowship in International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Lyon, France, and in Harvard Medical School. In 2008, he began his career as a Senior Research Scientist with the Cancer Science Institute (CSI) at the National University of Singapore. He joined the faculty of New York Medical College, Valhalla, NY, as an Assistant Professor in both the Department of Pediatrics, Cell Biology and Anatomy in 2011. Dr. Lee joined the faculty of MD Anderson as an Assistant Professor in 2016. Over 20 years, he has applied his translational research expertise toward improving and influencing care for patients, especially those with gynecologic malignancies at MD Anderson. He leads and oversees all aspects of translational study in gynecologic cancers as translational research director of Institutional ovarian cancer moonshot program, and further develops the translational research portfolio ensuring the acquisition of more comprehensive information from each patient in our clinical trial and non-clinical trial settings. His research interests focus on the investigation of the function and mechanisms of oncogenic and/or tumor-suppressive genes in immunochemotherapy sensitivity and resistance in ovarian cancer using preclinical in vitro and in vivo models. He is also interested in discovering novel small-molecule therapeutic targeting agents and explaining the mechanisms of drug resistance to immunochemotherapy in gynecologic cancers.