Who We Fund

Stanford University

Yang Feng, PhD, is a postdoc scholar at Stanford University. She conducted research at Georgetown University and completed her doctoral training in Guryanova lab at the University of Florida (UF). Her PhD thesis work depicted the causal relationship of DNMT3A-mutant blood cells on aggressive solid tumors for the first time. She studies the preventive therapy for high-risk TP53-mutant AML with primary human samples during postdoc training in Majeti Lab. She has a track of record of publications on high-impact journals including Cancer Discovery. Her exemplary work merited the UF Outstanding Achievement Award and Predoctoral Award in 2020, ASH Abstract Achievement Award in 2021, Stanford PRISM Award in 2022 and the “Best of Year” Award of JEM in 2023, Stanford TRAM Pilot Grant for 2023-2025 and ASH Abstract Achievement Award in 2025. Her career goal is becoming an independent investigator in hematological malignancy research, to discover effective therapeutics for blood cancers.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Therapeutic potential of DOCK1 inhibition in preventing and treating TP53-mutant AML

Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center

I am a pediatric oncologist and associate professor in the division of bone marrow transplantation at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. I have a clinical and research interest in graft versus host disease because this is the most significant, devastating and life-impacting complication after a bone marrow transplant. I led the study in children of high dose oral vitamin A and showed that when given before starting chemotherapy, vitamin A reduces acute gastrointestinal and chronic graft versus host disease. I am now collaborating with 3 adult BMT programs to try and validate my findings in adult BMT patients as adults tend to have more chronic GVHD than children and I would like to extend this easy and effective strategy to patients of all ages across the US and worldwide.

Program Name(s)

Academic Clinical Trials Program (ACT)

Project Title

A randomized clinical trial of oral vitamin A to reduce chronic graft versus host disease in BMT

Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine

I (Reshmi Parameswaran) am a scientist working in the field of cancer immunotherapy for past 22 years. I received my Ph.D degree from Weizmann Institute of Israel in cell biology and then did postdoctoral training at Children's Hospital Los Angeles working on understanding the drug resistance mechanism of Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. Later I moved to Case Western University and my laboratory is focusing on developing new immunotherapies for liquid and solid cancers. We generated a new BAFF ligand based CAR-T therapy to treat B cell cancers and this entered into three clinical trials for treating lymphoma, multiple myeloma and autoimmune lupus. All are currently in phase-1 clinical trials. I have published about 25 articles on cancer immunotherapy and received multiple research grants to develop new immunotherapy strategies for cancer. I am committed to find the reason why HCLv patients fail chemotherapy and to develop a new therapy to sensitize these patients to standard chemotherapy.

Program Name(s)

Hairy Cell Leukemia Research Initiative

Project Title

Understanding the drug resistance mechanism and developing new therapeutic strategies for Hairy Cell Leukemia variant

Washington University in St. Louis

Dr. Bern is a post-doctoral fellow in Dr. Timothy Ley’s lab at Washington University School of Medicine and a clinical fellow in the Hematology and Oncology program. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Physics from Duke University. Following undergraduate, he completed M.D./Ph.D. training at Washington University School of Medicine, where he earned his Ph.D. in Immunology, studying mechanisms regulating natural killer cell activation, in the laboratory of Dr. Wayne Yokoyama. He then joined the Physician Scientist Training Program at Washington University School of Medicine for Internal Medicine residency and Heme/Onc fellowship. His current research is focused on understanding mechanisms of chemotherapy resistance in Primary-Refractory Acute Myeloid Leukemia. His long-term goal is to identify novel therapeutic strategies for this population of patients with extremely poor outcomes and few treatment options.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Identifying Mechanisms of Chemoresistance Induced by MECOM in Primary-Refractory Acute Myeloid Leukemia

Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania

Dr. Garfall is a hematologist-oncologist specializing in the care of multiple myeloma patients and research on new multiple myeloma therapies. He is a member of the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is an Assistant Professor of Medicine. Dr. Garfall completed his undergraduate studies at Princeton University, medical school at New York University, residency in internal medicine at Brigham & Women’s Hospital, and hematology/oncology fellowship at Penn. Dr. Garfall’s research focuses on immunotherapy. He has conducted clinical trials with CAR T cells and bispecific antibodies for multiple myeloma. He is specifically interested on developing new approaches to prevent relapse in multiple myeloma patients.

Program Name(s)

Academic Clinical Trials Program (ACT)

Translational Research Program

Project Title

Limited-duration bispecific antibody therapy for multiple myeloma

Anti-Sox2 immunotherapy to prevent multiple myeloma relapse

The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

Dr. Shannon Maude is a pediatric oncologist and clinical trialist in the Cancer Immunotherapy Program at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. Dr. Maude received her M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and completed her residency in pediatrics as well as fellowship in pediatric hematology-oncology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Dr. Maude developed the Cancer Immunotherapy and BMT Fellowship at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and currently serves as a Medical Director in the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Maude is a member of the Children’s Oncology Group ALL committee and leads investigator-initiated and international multi-center clinical trials of engineered T cell therapies for childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Improving CAR T-cell Therapy Efficacy in Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia by Optimizing Design and Placement

The University of Chicago

Dr. Megan McNerney, MD/PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Pathology and Pediatrics at The University of Chicago. She is a cancer genomicist and physician-scientist investigating how genetic changes alter normal hematopoiesis and drive malignancy. She also serves as an Attending in the Genomic and Molecular Pathology clinical laboratory. Dr. McNerney leads a team of 14 scientists interrogating the pathogenesis of loss of chromosome 7 and CUX1 in high-risk myeloid malignancies. She has published 34 manuscripts, many in top-tier journals. Mentoring and education are among her most meaningful roles, and the majority of her trainees have remained in biomedical research after leaving the lab. She is also dedicated to promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in all aspects of her scholarship. Dr. McNerney has received numerous honors, including the Blood Cancer United Fellow Award and the Blood Cancer United, Illinois Chapter Researcher of the Year.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Genomic interrogation of high-risk myeloid neoplasms to identify new therapies

Washington University in St. Louis

Michael Kramer, M.D., Ph.D., is a medical oncologist specializing in the treatment of patients with blood cancers and the study of Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML). Dr. Kramer completed his M.D. and Ph.D. at the University of California-San Diego, where he worked with Dr. Trey Ideker to develop artificial intelligence-based methods to extract biological meaning from “big data”. He completed clinical training in Internal Medicine and Hematology / Oncology at Washington University in St. Louis. During post-doctoral time with Dr. Tim Ley, he studied how AML-causing mutations affect protein abundance, and has focused on identifying novel mechanisms for the treatment of AML patients with mutations in NPM1. Long term, Dr. Kramer intends to combine artificial intelligence tools and the experimental study of AML samples to understand how the AML-causing mutations affect protein interactions, and to find ways to target these abnormal interactions for the benefit of patients.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Targeting oncogenic protein interactions in Acute Myeloid Leukemia with nucleophosmin (NPM1c) mutations

University of Colorado Denver, Anschutz Medical Campus

Dr. Craig T. Jordan is currently the Nancy Carroll Allen Professor and Chief of the Division of Hematology at the University of Colorado Denver.  He has been studying human leukemia stem cells for over 20 years, using molecular and genetic analyses to identify characteristics that may enhance targeted therapy for leukemia. Dr. Jordan completed his doctoral studies at Princeton University and then went on to perform post-doctoral studies at MIT’s Whitehead Institute. He has been an editorial board member for several journals including Cell Stem Cell, Leukemia, and PLoS Biology. Dr. Jordan has published over 150 peer-reviewed original research articles, review articles and book chapters. His honors include the Helen Hay Whitney Fellowship, the Stohlman Scholar Award from Blood Cancer United, the Wehrheim Professorship in cancer research, and the NCI Outstanding Investigator award.

Program Name(s)

Discovery

Specialized Center of Research Program

Project Title

Therapeutic targeting of AML stem cells 2023

Modeling LSC heterogeneity at unprecedented resolution in AML

OHSU Knight Cancer Institute

Samantha Tauchmann Ph.D. is a postdoc at the Oregon Health & Science University. She received a B.S. in Molecular Life Sciences from Maastricht University in the Netherlands and her M.Sc. in Biomedical Sciences from the Transnational University Limburg. She completed her PhD under the mentorship of Prof. Dr. Jürg Schwaller at the University Children`s Hospital Basel in Switzerland, where she investigated the role of the methyltransferase NSD1 and the key erythroid transcription factor, GATA1, in erythroleukemia. Dr. Tauchmann joined the Maxson laboratory in February 2023. Her postdoctoral studies are focused on uncovering how SETBP1 mutations contribute to leukemia by modulating the function of methyltransferases. With a strong commitment to understanding blood cell development and leukemia biology, Dr. Tauchmann aspires to identify new therapeutics for SETBP1-mutant leukemias. Her long-term goal is to run an academic laboratory focused on epigenetic dysregulation in blood cancers.

Project Title

Histone methyltransferases as key dependencies in SETBP1-mutant leukemias

Moffitt Cancer Center

Gary Reuther, PhD (Professor in the Departments of Molecular Oncology and Malignant Hematology at the Moffitt Cancer Center) earned his PhD from Duke University and did his post-doctoral training with Channing Der (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), where he studied signaling by the RAS oncoprotein and identified novel leukemia oncogenes. His current research centers on JAK2 signaling and novel therapeutic strategies for MPNs. Over the past 20 years, he has obtained research funding from multiple NIH R01 grants, the MPN Research Foundation, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, the Department of Defense, and the V Foundation for Cancer Research, and was the recipient of an American Cancer Society Research Scholar Award and an NIH/NCI Howard Temin Award. His experience leading research that led to this funding and successful completion and publication of these projects makes him highly qualified to serve as the PI on the proposed studies.

Program Name(s)

Translational Research Program

Project Title

Novel therapeutic strategies to improve the outcomes of patients with myeloproliferative neoplasms

Columbia University Medical Center

Teresa Palomero is a Professor of Pathology and Cell Biology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and an internationally recognized cancer researcher in the field of leukemia and lymphoma. For more than 25 years, she has studied how genetic and molecular changes cause aggressive blood cancers and how to translate this knowledge into new treatments. Her discoveries have helped define the genetic basis of several T-cell lymphomas and leukemias and identified new therapeutic targets. Her laboratory has also developed advanced mouse models to better understand disease biology and preclinical testing of precision therapies. Dr. Palomero’s work has been published in leading scientific journals and has contributed to shaping the current understanding of T-cell lymphomas, paving the way for the development of targeted therapies.

Program Name(s)

Discovery

Translational Research Program

Project Title

Targeting Microenvironment Determinants in Peripheral T-cell Lymphoma

Therapeutic Targeting of Sphingosine-1-phosphate Receptor 1 in Angioimmunoblastic T-Cell Lymphoma