My clinical specialty is pediatric oncology. I’m particularly interested in solid tumors, liver tumors and cancer predisposition. My research focuses on pediatric liver cancer, developmental tumorigenesis and cancer genetics and genomics.

While my interest in combining cancer research with patient care developed early through my undergraduate studies and research experiences, I was drawn to pediatrics and pediatric oncology during my clinical rotations in medical school. As a physician-scientist, I was particularly inspired by the advances made in treating childhood cancers while recognizing the persistent challenges and opportunities to apply my scientific training to improve care for this vulnerable patient population.

For my PhD in the laboratory of Dr. Titia de Lange at Rockefeller University, I studied telomeres, the repetitive sequences found at the ends of linear chromosomes and the associated proteins that protect chromosome ends from being recognized as sites of DNA damage. While my predoctoral training focused on mechanisms by which genomic instability and mutations give rise to cancer as individuals age, my training in pediatric oncology led me to realize the vast biological differences between the spectrum of cancers that develop in children and those that occur in adults. As a clinical and postdoctoral fellow, I joined Dr. Roel Nusse's laboratory at Stanford University to gain further training in developmental biology. There, I directed my research focus to pediatric liver cancer—specifically hepatoblastoma, a solid tumor that arises most commonly in infancy—to understand better how cancers develop in children.

I’m particularly interested in how tumors initiate and grow during specific developmental time windows and how these processes differ when they occur during development as opposed to adulthood. My lab focuses on the most common primary liver cancer in children, hepatoblastoma, using patient-derived tumor organoids and by engineering new mouse models that more faithfully recapitulate tumorigenesis during the developmental period. Our studies aim to identify new strategies for treating liver and other pediatric cancers and to uncover broad paradigms that underlie the unique mechanisms of tumorigenesis during embryonic and early postnatal development.

I’m honored to have received several awards, including the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award for Medical Scientists (2024-2029), the William Guy Forbeck Research Foundation Scholar Award (2022), the Damon Runyon-Jake Wetchler Award in Pediatric Innovation (2021) and the Damon Runyon-Sohn Pediatric Cancer Fellowship Award (2019-2023).