Student Profiles

Grace’s research interests began in Professor Erin Bromage’s laboratory at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. As a comparative immunology laboratory, she studied the adaptive immune response in rainbow trout to vaccination, with the goal to improve animal vaccinations for the aquaculture industry. Here, she also contributed to a case study involving the use of bacteriophage therapy for a loggerhead turtle suffering from a persistent bacterial infection as an alternative to antibiotics.

After her graduation in 2020 with a Bachelor of Science in biology, she desired to integrate into oncology research. To achieve this, she joined the laboratory of Dr. Alex Toker at Harvard Medical School, where their research centers around PI3K/Akt cellular signaling and its implications in cellular metabolism in breast cancer. Some of her contributions to the laboratory include aiding in a genome wide CRISPR screen to gain mechanistic insights of pathway crosstalk with PI3K/Akt signaling in ovarian cancer, exploring hits from another genome wide CRISPR screen in triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) with hopes to identify druggable genetic targets that work in synergy with PI3K/Akt inhibitors, and characterizing pTyr sites on metabolic enzymes that are important in TNBC. She has also worked in collaboration with the Dibble laboratory at Harvard Medical School, where she made significant contributions to their work identifying PANK4 as a novel Akt substrate that regulates CoA synthesis from vitamin B5.

As a NIH-Cambridge PhD scholar, she will continue her work in cancer biology. With the mentorship of Professor Marc de la Roche from the University of Cambridge and Dr. John Hammer from the NHLBI, she will explore adenomatous polyposis coli (APC) deregulation in colorectal cancer utilizing organoid models and the implications this deregulation in cytoskeletal rearrangement and motor proteins. Grace has a long-term goal of a career in academia and looks forward to getting involved with science policy in graduate school and after graduation.