DoM Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine Faculty Awards!
2026 Dahod Breast Cancer Research Awards
Mollie Barnard, ScD, and Ruben Dries, PhD, both assistant professors of medicine/hematology & medical oncology, will test whether tumor samples from the Black Women’s Health Study can support high‑resolution mapping of immune cells in breast cancer. They will assess data quality and identify the most effective tissue‑sampling approaches for creating accurate and representative views of each tumor’s immune environment.
Ignaty Leshchiner, PhD, assistant professor of medicine/computational biomedicine, and his team previously identified that metastatic ER-positive breast cancers frequently develop resistance to targeted inhibitors and endocrine therapy through diverse, coexisting mechanisms, including convergent loss-of-function alterations in the chromatin modifier genes across independent resistant subclones, driving reduced ER signaling and multidrug resistance. This project will investigate how chromatin dysregulation promotes therapy-resistant progression and potential therapeutic vulnerabilities.
2026 Shipley Prostate Cancer Research Awards
Ignaty Leshchiner, PhD, assistant professor of medicine/computational biomedicine, and Gerald Denis, PhD, professor of medicine/hematology & medical oncology, previously found that plasma exosomes from diabetic patients carry distinct microRNAs that reprogram prostate cancer cells, inducing epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition and stable transcriptional changes via epigenetic pathways. This project will investigate how diabetic exosomes drive persistent metastatic phenotypes on the epigenetic level.
2026 Sexual Medicine Research Funds Awards
Ann Zumwalt, PhD, associate professor of anatomy & neurobiology, and Carl Streed, MD, MPH, associate professor of medicine/GIM, will build on prior work by their research team that demonstrated faculty development and institutional culture are significant drivers of medical training quality regarding gender- and sexuality-diverse (GSD) populations. They now will expand these investigations to a national context and support developing GSD trainings for educators.
2026 Wing Tat Lee Awards
Chao Zhang, PhD, assistant professor of computational biomedicine, will collaborate with Dr. Jiguang Wang, associate professor at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. They will develop a physics-informed deep learning framework to model cell relationships and temporal transitions, addressing limitations in biological conservation during data integration and advancing insights into brain aging and glioblastoma progression.