People

Lying at the heart of the success of the CEO are our amazing people: students, technicians, administrators, residents, and post-doctoral fellows.

Andrew Miller

Born in New York City, Andrew grew up in suburbian New Jersey. After 13 years of Yeshiva day school, and 1 year abroad studying in Jerusalem, he obtained a degree in Biochemistry at Brandeis University. He obtained his medical degree from Weill Cornell Medicine, and matched into General Surgery at Montefiore Medical Center. Andrew completed the first 2 years (out of 5) of his surgery residency. He is now participating in a 2 year T32 Surgical Residency Research Fellowship in Dr. Oktay's Lab. Andrew is researching specific pathways in breast cancer metastasis. Along with several other lab members, he is focused on the effects of Notch1 and NF-kB signaling in vivo. His work includes cell culture of highly specialized cell lines, maintaining mice with breast tumors, and imaging those tumors intravitally and extravitally using a multiphoton microscope.

Burcu Karadal-Ferrena

Burcu Karadal-Ferrena, M.D. completed her medical degree at Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Tumor Biology and Immunology Program at Hacettepe University. She worked on KEAP1/LKB1 mutations in genetically engineered lung cancer models for her predoctoral research at Dr. Papagiannakopoulos's lab, NYU Langone Health. Her goal is to be a pathologist and physician-scientist. Her main interests are cancer biology, tumor microenvironment, breast cancer pathology, and translational research. Dr. Karadal-Ferrena is currently working on translational and basic science projects in the lab. The main focus of her translational research is racial disparity in the tumor microenvironment (TMEM doorways, macrophages) pre/post neoadjuvant chemotherapy in patients with breast cancer. The main focus of her basic science research is to determine if TMEM doorways are functional in lung metastasis. For her basic science project, she is optimizing a spontaneous lung metastasis model using human and mouse breast cancer cell lines.

Camille Duran

Camille Duran is a native of Dallas, Texas, and graduated from The Ohio State University with a Bachelor's degree in Molecular Genetics and a minor in Spanish Language. She earned her PhD in Genetics in the laboratory of Kayla Bayless at Texas A&M University, studying the molecular regulation of endothelial and glioblastoma cell invasion. She joined the Condeelis lab as a postdoctoral fellow in 2018 and was supported by an IRACDA/K12 fellowship from NIGMS and a Ruth L. Kirschstein NRSA F32 postdoctoral fellowship from the NCI, investigating the role of NF-κB signaling in breast cancer metastasis. Camille is currently a Research Assistant Professor in the Pathology Department investigating the induction of invasive, stem, and inflammatory phenotypes in pro-metastatic cancer cells and the effect of systemic therapies on the tumor microenvironment and cancer progression.

Lillian Molina

Lillian Molina is administrator for the Integrated Imaging Program for Cancer Research. She has been at Einstein for more than 28 years, initially serving as the administrative assistant to Dr. John Condeelis, who was co-chair of anatomy & structural biology. As her experience and skills grew, so did her responsibilities; she was appointed department administrator for anatomy & structural biology, a position she held for over 22 years.

Lillian brings decades of experience working efficiently with a team of principal investigators and physician-scientists, assuring that their research needs and efforts are fully supported. She also has diverse professional capabilities with team building, establishing and fostering relationships, training, and coaching. Lillian enjoys traveling, doing missionary work, and spending time with her family.

Madeline Friedman

Maddie graduated from UMass Amherst with a bachelor's degree in Nutrition. She then worked as a Clinical Research Coordinator at Massachusetts General Hospital, where she ran several clinical studies related to hereditary gastrointestinal cancers. Here, Maddie's research focuses on how chemotherapy affects the invasive and stem properties of breast cancer cells and the metastatic cascade they follow. The goal of this work is to enhance understanding of how chemotherapy influences the disease process, identify, and investigate any undesirable side effects of chemotherapy, and refine treatment strategies for patients with breast cancer.

Mohd Nauman

Mohd Nauman completed his Ph.D. in Cancer Biology from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India to identify molecular mechanisms associated with chemo-preventative efficacy of gallic acid and acetylsalicylic acid against hepatocellular carcinoma. He joined Department of Cell Biology, Einstein as a postdoctoral research fellow in 2018 and studied Notch-ligand induced differentiation of intestinal stem cell in several glycosyltranferases knock out mice models. Currently, he is the part of CEO group as a postdoctoral research fellow and working to determine the molecular interactions involved in breast cancer extravasation to the lung. Mena invasive (MenaINV), an isoform of actin regulatory protein, is found over expressed in mammalian breast cancer. Previous studies from our group showed that contact between breast cancer cell and macrophage is necessary for the induction of MenaINV. Furthermore, the direct interaction of cancer cell and macrophage induces stem-like phenotypes in cancer cell. The cancer stem cell co-expressing MenaINV seems potentially regulating key steps in the breast cancer metastasis being able to intravasate to the blood vessels through Tumor Microenvironment doorways. In the present study, in vivo models of breast cancer are being used to determine the steps of lung metastasis that require invasive and stem cell characteristics using intravital imaging technique.

Nicole Barth

Nicole Barth graduated in Biochemistry from the University of Wuerzburg, Germany in 2016. She started working and publishing in the field of Immunology throughout her Masters. She finished her PhD in winter 2020 in Optical Medical Imaging with Healthcare Innovation and Entrepreneurship joint awarded from the University of Edinburgh and University of Strathclyde. Her PhD was highly interdisciplinary using chemistry, molecular biology and immunology to validate Apo-15/ ApotrackerTM Green as a novel probe for the detection of apoptosis. She has been awarded a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship for studying immune responses in the primary and metastatic tissue upon immunotherapy in vivo in real-time. The fellowship is split between the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the University of Edinburgh. It exploits the world-leading imaging technologies at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine to study immune responses to therapy in vivo in real-time.

Prachiben Patel

Prachi Patel completed her undergrad in Biotechnology at Smt. S M Panchal Science College, Talod, India. She next graduated from Long Island University, NY with Master's degree in Biomedical Sciences. Her interest is to follow research in the field of biomedical sciences to gain insight into human health at the molecular level that primarily includes area of cancer biology, pathophysiology, and molecular immunology.

Miss. Patel is working as research technician. Her role includes working within the multi-disciplinary team focused on studying the mechanisms of metastasizing breast cancer cells and the effect of various systemic treatments on cancer cell dissemination. For these research aims, she is working on generation, testing, and maintenance of cell lines expressing fluorescent biosensors as well as testing of fluorescent mouse models.

Robert Eddy

Dr. Robert Eddy is a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Pathology with a research focus on the signal transduction pathways underlying the promotion of tumor cell motility and dissemination by invadopodia within the tumor microenvironment. As Technical Director of the Translational Pathology Laboratory, he explores changes in the expression of unique biomarkers associated with tumor cell invasiveness, stemness and dormancy during the metastatic cascade in various patient tumor samples. Dr. Eddy currently oversees the development and validation of antibody probes against these biomarkers and evaluates their potential as prognostic markers in the clinical setting.

Xiaoming (Mary) Chen

Mary Chen received her master's degree in bacteriology from UW-Madison and has worked in the biomedical research labs for many years. She currently works in TPC lab as a research technician focus on IHC and IF stains, antibody isolation and purification.

Xianjun Ye

Research Assistant Professor

Dr. Xianjun Ye is a physicist-turned biomedical researcher specialized in technology development for cancer research. He held a bachelor's degree in Optoelectronics Engineering and a PhD in Physics with emphasis in Nonlinear Optics. His past experience includes optical tweezers, photo-mechanics, digital image processing based confocal microscopy, and photoluminescence in nano science.

At Einstein, he has developed a few novel technologies for multiphoton intravital microscopy, including a correlative microscopy technique which enables the co-registering of multiphoton microscopy with histopathology across large tissue area at single cell resolution, a microfluidic imaging window for localized engineering of tumor microenvironment, and a laser ablation microscope for studying murine lung damage repair. In addition, he also developed a digital pathology-based biomarker for prognosticating metastatic breast cancer.

Priyanka Parmar

Priyanka Parmar graduated from Stony Brook University in 2015 with a Bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering. She then went on to complete her medical training and received her MD from SUNY Downstate College of Medicine in 2017 with a specialization in global health. She is currently completing her surgical residency at Montefiore-Einstein and is interested in breast surgical oncology. She has been awarded the Ruth L. Kirschstein NRSA T32 postdoctoral fellowship and is spending a dedicated two years investigating breast cancer metastasis, specifically understanding the molecular mechanisms of breast cancer extravasation in the lung.

Yookyung Jung

Yookyung Jung holds Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Physics from Seoul National University and obtained his PhD in Physics at Purdue University, concentrating on nonlinear optical properties of nanomaterials and label-free imaging with coherent Raman scattering microscopy. Following his PhD, he conducted postdoctoral research at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, gaining expertise in diverse optical microscopy methods and investigating bone marrow blood vessels in mouse models. Recognized as a Young Scientist Fellow by the Institute for Basic Science in Korea, he contributed to deep tissue optical imaging in mouse brain and eye. As the manager of the Tufts Advanced Microscopic Imaging Center, he collaborated on research involving label-free metabolic imaging and spectral analysis of lipids in biological tissues. He also served as a principal investigator at TissueVision inc., specializing in high-resolution 3D whole organ optical imaging. Currently, as a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology, his research centers on the study of metastasis of breast cancer by using intravital optical microscopy.

Suryansh Shukla

Suryansh completed his undergraduate degree in Biomedical Engineering from Shri. G.S. Institute of Technology and Science, Indore, M.P. India where he graduated with Bachelor of Technology (Honors). In 2021, he came to the United States for his master’s in biomedical engineering with focus area imaging and medical devices from Johns Hopkins University. During his master’s he worked on three different research projects. In his first project he developed a software to monitor adherence to immunosuppressive drug for adolescent and young adults undergone either undergone kidney or liver transplant. In the second project he worked on enabling and verifying the interchangeability between mathematical model-based beamforming and deep learning-based beamforming of ultrasound images. In his third project, which was also his master’s thesis work, he published a thesis titled “Computational Analysis of 3D Cleared and Labeled Pancreatic Cancer Samples”, where he developed and utilized the image processing tools for quantification of invasion in three dimensional images of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma. At Einstein Suryansh is currently a Staff Scientist in the department of pathology. He is working on developing machine learning and deep learning tools for digital pathology to evaluate and validate biomarkers.

Former Lab Members

Brian Traub
Chinmay Surve
Christian Adkisson
George Karagiannis
Gina Kim
Lucia Borriello
Ved Sharma
Wei Du
Yarong Wang
Alessandro Genna
Anochka Coste
Edison Leung
Evanthia Roussos
Jessica Pastoriza
Luis Rivera
Matt Oser
Rojin Jafari
Sonia Voiculescu
Zulma Griffin
Jeffry Wyckoff
Allison Harney
Bojana Gligirijevic
Brian Beaty
Esther Arwert
Javier Bravo-Cordero
Jeanine Pignatelli
Antonia Patsialou
Max Weidmann
Gustavo Martinez-Delgado

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