Student Profiles

Joey graduated from Harvard College in 2021 with an A.B. in Integrative Biology and secondary in Chemistry. During his undergraduate thesis research, he investigated mechanisms of response to cancer immunotherapy, including the role of the gut microbiome in metastatic melanoma under Dr. Jen Wargo at MD Anderson. He additionally explored long non-coding RNAs associated with immunotherapy response in melanoma and glioblastoma under Dr. Marco Mineo and Dr. Nino Chiocca at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, work that he continued as a medical student at Harvard, where he matriculated in 2022. Between college and medical school, Joey was awarded a Herchel Smith Fellowship in Science to pursue an MPhil in Prof. Richard Gilbertson’s lab at the University of Cambridge, where he studied the immune microenvironment of medulloblastoma. 

A Bethesda native, Joey graduated from St. Albans School in Washington, DC. His passion for biomedical research blossomed as a high school student, when he had the opportunity to study the genetics of erythrocyte homeostasis in Dr. Dave Bodine’s lab at the NIH. 

As a PhD student, Joey will work under the supervision of Dr. Javed Khan and Prof. Richard Gilbertson. He is interested in understanding the immune microenvironments of malignancies—including rhabdomyosarcoma, neuroblastoma, and brain tumors—and their corresponding normal developing tissues. Aspiring to identify novel immunotherapeutic approaches for cancer, Joey plans to utilize single cell sequencing, spatial transcriptomics, and animal models to characterize the behavior of the immune system across these various biological contexts.