People

The Team

Eliezer Van Allen, MD - Principal Investigator

Dr. Van Allen is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, a clinician at Dana-Farber/Partners Cancer Care, and an Associate Member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. His research focuses on computational cancer genomics, the application of new molecular profiling technologies to advance precision cancer medicine, and studying resistance to cancer therapeutics. As both a computational biologist and medical oncologist, he has specific expertise in clinical computational oncology and the development of algorithms to analyze and interpret genomic data for clinically focused questions. Overall, his research will make important contributions to the field of precision cancer medicine and resistance to targeted therapeutics via expertise and study in translational and clinical bioinformatics.

Originally from Los Angeles, CA, he studied Symbolic Systems at Stanford University, obtained his M.D. from UCLA, and completed a residency in internal medicine at UCSF before coming to Boston and completing a medical oncology fellowship at the Dana-Farber/Partners Cancer Care program.

Vidal Arroyo, BS

Saud AlDubayan, MD
Instructor, Harvard Medical School
Saud is a board-certified clinical geneticist and computational biologist in the Center for Cancer Genetics and Prevention at DFCI. Saud obtained his Medical Doctorate degree in 2009 and has done clinical training in adult medicine at the University of Toronto as well as clinical genetics and genomics at Harvard Medical School. Saud also did postdoctoral research training in computational biology at DFCI/Broad as well as translational genomics at Harvard Clinical and Translational Academy. In addition to clinically evaluating patients with inherited cancer-predisposition syndromes, Saud is also a dedicated scientist whose research interest has focused on exploring the utility of integrative DNA-repair centered analyses of paired germline and tumor genetic and transcriptomic data for informing clinical decision making. Saud’s current research work aims to explore novel inherited and somatic genomic predictors of cancer risk, cancer progression and chemoresistance in large cohorts of cancer patients.

Kevin Bi, BS
Associate Computuational Biologist (single cell analysis)

Jake Conway, BS (Bioinformatics)
Graduate Student, Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics

Felix Dietlein, MD, PhD
Post-doctoral Fellow

Haitham Elmarakeby, PhD (Computer Science)
Post-doctoral Fellow

Seunghun Han, BS
Graduate Student, BBS

Meng Xiao He, AB (Molecular and Cellular Biology)
Graduate Student, Biophysics
Meng Xiao is a student in the Harvard Biophysics PhD program. In the Van Allen lab, he mainly focuses on single-cell RNA-sequencing but is broadly interested in genetics. Having worked as a software engineer before returning to Harvard, he is interested in practical uses for his training in biology and computer science.

Alma Imamovic, MS
Associate Computational Biologist

Sophia Kamran, MD
Resident, Radiation Oncology

Tanya Keenan, MD MPH
Medical Oncology Fellow, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Tanya is a medical oncology fellow, who joined the Van Allen lab after completing an MPH in epidemiology at Hopkins and internal medicine residency and chief residency at MGH. She is driven to improve responses to immunotherapy in breast cancer by investigating mechanisms of resistance to checkpoint blockade.

David Konieczkowski, MD, PhD
Radiation Oncology Resident, Harvard Radiation Oncology Program

Derek Liu, BS (HST MD program)

Shirley Mo (HST), AB (Applied Mathematics)

Nicholas Moore, BS
HMS Y4

Jackson Nyman, BS
Graduate Student, Systems Biology

Jihye Park, PhD
Instructor, Harvard Medical School
Jihye received her education at Pennsylvania State University, with a BS in molecular biology and statistics and a PhD in bioinformatics and genomics. She currently works at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, with a dual position in the Van Allen and Ghobrial labs. In previous positions, she worked in computational clinical research that brought contributions to public health issues, including bacterial infection and antibiotic resistance. Her current research focuses on discovering genomic, transcriptomic, and immune-genomic markers that are associated with tumor progression from early precursor conditions, such as MGUS and SMM, to Multiple Myeloma (MM). She desires to bridge the gap among experimental biologists, computational scientists and clinicians, and to synergize their research efforts.

Brendan Reardon, BS (Physics)
Associate Computational Biologist
Brendan originally conducted research in astrophysics while studying physics at Brandeis University before migrating to computational biology and clinical computational oncology. His research is now motivated by the goal of improving clinical interpretation in cancer genomics, especially through integrative approaches.