Thomas Clarke, Ph.D

Assistant Professor, Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine

Biography

Dr. Clarke studied Medical Science at the University of Exeter in the UK, which included a twelve-month research internship at Harvard Medical School. He then pursued a Ph.D. at the University of Birmingham in the laboratory of Dr. Clare Davies, working on understanding the importance of the arginine methyltransferase enzyme, PRMT5, in the DNA damage response (Clarke et al, Molecular Cell; 2017).

After his Ph.D., Dr. Clarke was awarded an EMBO Postdoctoral Fellowship and joined the laboratory of Dr. Johnathan Whetstine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where he worked on elucidating the importance of chromatin dynamics and histone modifications for the regulation of extra chromosomal DNA amplifications (Clarke et al, Cancer Discovery; 2020). After the completion of his EMBO fellowship, Dr. Clarke joined the laboratory of Dr. Raul Mostoslavsky, Scientific Director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, to bridge his interests in chromatin dynamics, DNA damage repair and genome stability maintenance. Funded by fellowships from the Charles King Trust and Massachusetts General Hospital Fund for Medical Discovery, Dr. Clarke has been working to identify and characterize novel chromatin factors involved in DNA damage repair, linking these factors to the pathology of several cancers and human developmental syndromes (Clarke et al, Nature Cell Biology; 2025).

In the summer of 2022, Dr. Clarke became a junior faculty member at Harvard Medical School and The Massachusetts General Hospital Krantz Family Center for Cancer Research. In January 2024, funded by a National Institutes of Health K99/R00 career development award, Dr. Clarke joined the faculty at Boston University School of Medicine as an Assistant Professor to start his independent research laboratory.

Email: tlclarke@bu.edu
Phone: 617-358-1429

Publications

  • Published 6/16/2025

    Clarke TL, Cho HM, Ceppi I, Gao B, Yadav T, Silveira GG, Boon R, Martinez-Pastor B, Amoh NYA, Machin B, Bernasocchi T, Ashfaq D, Mendez J, Kamaliyan Z, Del Río Pantoja J, Rogines GS, Crowley BT, McGinn DE, Giunta V, Tran O, Zackai EH, Lan L, Zou L, Emanuel BS, McDonald-McGinn DM, Cejka P, Mostoslavsky R. ZNF280A links DNA double-strand break repair to human 22q11.2 distal deletion syndrome. Nat Cell Biol. 2025 Jun 16. PMID: 40523937.

    Read at: PubMed

  • Published 5/14/2025

    Woodward BL, Lahiri S, Chauhan AS, Garcia MR, Goodley LE, Clarke TL, Pal M, Agathanggelou A, Jhujh SS, Ganesh AN, Hollins FM, Deforie VG, Maroofian R, Efthymiou S, Meinhardt A, Mathew CG, Simpson MA, Mefford HC, Faqeih EA, Rosenzweig SD, Volpi S, Di Matteo G, Cancrini C, Scardamaglia A, Shackley F, Davies EG, Ibrahim S, Arkwright PD, Zaki MS, Stankovic T, Taylor AMR, Mazur AJ, Di Donato N, Houlden H, Rothenberg E, Stewart GS. Inherited deficiency of DIAPH1 identifies a DNA double strand break repair pathway regulated by ?-actin. Nat Commun. 2025 May 14; 16(1):4491. PMID: 40368919.

    Read at: PubMed

  • Published 7/25/2024

    Kamaliyan Z, Clarke TL. Zinc finger proteins: guardians of genome stability. Front Cell Dev Biol. 2024; 12:1448789. PMID: 39119040.

    Read at: PubMed

  • Published 7/28/2022

    Clarke TL, Mostoslavsky R. DNA repair as a shared hallmark in cancer and ageing. Mol Oncol. 2022 Sep; 16(18):3352-3379. PMID: 35834102.

    Read at: PubMed

  • Published 12/28/2021

    Martinez-Pastor B, Silveira GG, Clarke TL, Chung D, Gu Y, Cosentino C, Davidow LS, Mata G, Hassanieh S, Salsman J, Ciccia A, Bae N, Bedford MT, Megias D, Rubin LL, Efeyan A, Dellaire G, Mostoslavsky R. Assessing kinetics and recruitment of DNA repair factors using high content screens. Cell Rep. 2021 Dec 28; 37(13):110176. PMID: 34965416.

    Read at: PubMed

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