THE TEAM
Theresa Neal-Provenzano - Department Administrator
The Nucleus
Ashley Laughney, PhD
Assistant Professor,
Institute for Computational Biomedicine
Department of Physiology and Biophysics
Weill Cornell Medicine
New York, NY
Initially trained as an engineer and in systems biology, Ashley developed functional spectroscopy (Dartmouth College) and single cell imaging and genomics methods in cancer biology (Harvard Medical School and Memorial Sloan Kettering) to quantify functional diversity in individual tumor cells. Combining high-throughput single cell transcriptional profiling with development of innovative computational tools and recruited expertise in synthetic biology, her laboratory aims to understand how the same protein can adapt multiple functions during an evolutionary, multi-cellular process like cancer progression. Metastasis requires diverse functions including dissemination, adaptation to a less hospitable microenvironment, immune evasion and regeneration.
Chromosomal instability (CIN) is a key driver of this transition through chronic sensing of genomic double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) in the cytosol (Bakhoum, Ngo, Laughney et al., Nature 2018). Recently, her lab has shown CIN-induced chronic STING signaling can be unleashed by loss of polycomb repressive complex 1 activity, enabling uveal melanoma metastasis (…Laughney, Nature Communications 2021). Now, Ashley and her team are developing powerful tools to systematically quantify CIN-dependent ligand effects on the tumor microenvironment, to identify cellular and tissue contexts that critically shape the functional output of multi-modal proteins at distinct stages of disease progression.
Affiliated Research Programs:
Tri-Intstitutional PhD Program in Computational Biology and Medicine
Physiology Biophysics and Systems Biology
Cancer Genetics, Epigenetics and Systems Biology at Meyer Cancer Center
Mathew Deyell, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow
Ethan Earlie, MS
PhD Student
Tri-I Computational Biology & Medicine
Ethan received his M.S. in Computational Biology from Stony Brook University in 2020 after receiving his B.S. in Applied Mathematics and Statistics from Stony Brook in 2019. After which, he joined the lab as a computational research assistant working on single-cell genomics towards studying intra-tumor heterogeneity and the immune landscape of the tumor microenvironment. As a PhD student, he aims to develop computational methods for modeling cellular interaction dynamics in metastatic progression.
Karolina Budre, MS
Staff Associate
Austin Varela, BS, BA
Graduate Student
M.S. in Computational Biology
Austin received a B.S. in Computational Biology and a B.A. in Data Science from the University of Rochester in 2020. He applied novel computational techniques rooted in evolutionary biology to predict protein-protein interactions in the Werren Lab, for which he defended an original Honor’s research thesis. He then applied this work towards studying COVID-19 the subsequent year. He is currently pursuing an M.S. in Computational Biology and is interested in developing novel, data-driven methods for systems biology research with a specific interest in single-cell datasets.
Amelia Ohnstad, BS
PhD Student
Weill Cornell BCMB Program
Amelia received her Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry and molecular biology from Carroll College in Helena, MT. She then worked for 2 years as a laboratory technician at Dartmouth College in the lab studying mechanisms of non-canonical autophagy. As a PhD student, Amelia is excited to understand how cell specific contexts give rise to emergent functions of proteins throughout cancer metastasis.
Alumni
Noam Finkelstein, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow
Noam completed his PhD in the Shpitser Lab at Johns Hopkins University, working on methods for reasoning about causality using biased data. He holds an MSE in computer science and an ScM in biostatistics from JHU, and a BA in politics, philosophy and economics from the University of Oxford. He is now a Data Scientist at DELFINA.
Collaborators
Samuel Bakhoum, MD, PhD
Collaborator
Samuel is a Physician-Scientist and Assistant Member in the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. His lab studies chromosomal instability in tumor evolution and metastasis. Together with the Laughney lab, we explore cell type-specific inflammatory response programs and how they modulate crosstalk between the tumor and its microenvironment.
Join The Team
Prospective candidates should email LaughneyLabPositions@gmail.com the following as a single PDF:
(1) a cover letter describing your current and future research interests,
(2) your CV, and (3) names and contact information for three references.
Graduate Students – Please contact Ashley directly to arrange a meeting to talk about the research in the lab. Ashley is happy to jointly advise students and is open to students from other departments.
Postdocs – Please additionally send up to two reprints and arrange for three letters of reference to be emailed directly to LaughneyLabPositions@gmail.com on your behalf. Postdoctoral applications will not be reviewed until all letters of reference are received.
We are open to applicants from a variety of backgrounds, including both theory and experiment.
