Associate Professor, Director, Department of Computational and Quantitative Medicine
Russell Rockne, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computational and Quantitative Medicine within Beckman Research Institute of City of Hope. He also serves as director of the Division of Mathematical Oncology and Computational Systems Biology, with the goal of translating mathematics, physics and evolution-based research to clinical care.
Vikram Adhikarla is an Assistant Research Professor in the Division of Mathematical Oncology and Computational Systems Biology at City of Hope. He has a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Wisconsin – Madison with specialized focus in Medical Physics. His interests lie in the domain of computational modeling and analysis of both pre-clinical and clinical imaging data. He has experience in modeling tumor-vasculature system based on hypoxia and proliferation positron emission tomography (PET) imaging data and has worked on modeling the response of tumor-vasculature system to anti-angiogenic therapy.
He has further trained in the kinetic analysis of PET imaging data in the Department of Radiology at Emory University in Atlanta. His focus in particular has been on the evaluation of novel radiotracers used for imaging neurological disorders.
As a scientist at City of Hope, he uses his skills to analyze the migration of stem cells in immunohistological and three-dimensional cleared images of the mice brain. This data analysis feeds into his work on the prediction of stem cell migration paths for the translational purpose of optimizing the clinical delivery of stem cell therapeutics. Concurrently, he is also involved in analysis of clinical molecular imaging data for evaluation of novel radiotracers poised to deliver clinical impact.
Denis O'Meally is an Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Diabetes & Cancer Discovery Science (DMRI) and the Division of Mathematical Oncology & Computational Systems Biology at City of Hope. His research interests lie understanding genome structure, function and evolution. He holds a PhD from the Australian National University and his post-doctoral studies focused on gene-environment interactions and sequencing the genomes of strange Australian vertebrates. His interests span molecular biology to bioinformatics with a keen focus on reproducibility. At City of Hope, Dr. O’Meally collaborates with faculty across a number of departments to develop new insights and treatments into cancers, diabetes, HIV and other diseases.
Ryan Woodall is an Assistant Research Professor in the Division of Mathematical Oncology and Computational Systems Biology, working with Dr. Rockne on modeling the transport of interstitial fluid within brain tumors using computational fluid dynamics. He utilizes his experience in both computational fluid dynamics and medical image processing to create patient-specific models of fluid transport within the brain and tumor tissue. Ryan is interested in model discovery, and physics-interpretable machine learning, and it's applications to precision medicine. He completed his doctoral training at the University of Texas at Austin, where he worked closely with Dr. Tom Yankeelov on models of fluid flow within tumors and earned an NIH coursework portfolio in Imaging Science and Informatics. Ryan's background consists of developing contrast agent, nano-particle, and fluid delivery models for individual patients at the tissue and cellular scale. He is also interested in standardizing advanced MR acquisition methods across the healthcare industry, for better patient outcomes through applying modern data-driven techniques which require high-quality data.
Adina Matache is a part-time Senior Research Associate in the Division of Mathematical Oncology and Computational Systems Biology at City of Hope. She received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and her B.S. and M.S. degrees, both in Electrical Engineering from University of Washington.
Adina has extensive research experience with theoretical analysis and modeling and simulation of digital communication systems, including terrestrial and satellite communication systems. She gained her expertise in digital communications and information theory while working for commercial companies and Federally Funded R&D Centers. At City of Hope, she applies her knowledge in communication and information theory to research immune cell signaling in breast cancer. She hopes this research can lead to new insights into how immune cells are signaling and processing molecular information in healthy donors and how the intracellular signaling pathways may be impaired in breast cancer patients.
Martina Conte is a GSP-Visiting Scholar in the Division of Mathematical Oncology and Computational Systems Biology, working with Dr. Rockne on data-driven and data-integrated models for studying Car T-cell based therapy within brain tumors. She has a position as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Politecnico of Torino (Italy), while she carried on her doctoral research projects at the Basque Center for Applied Mathematics (BCAM - Bilbao) receiving her PhD at the University of Basque Country (Spain). Her Ph.D. research projects collect the development and analysis of several multiscale mathematical models analyzing various aspects of brain tumor growth and migration into the brain.
Currently, her main research lines focus on (i) describing the process of cell migration in the ECM, with a special attention to the case of tumor invasion, (ii) studying tumor-endothelial cells interactions and specific aspects related to the tumor angiogenesis process (e.g. hypoxia, treatment resistance), and (iii) analyzing signal propagation in the brain (through network analysis) and its relationship with physiological and pathological conditions. In the different project, great attention is paid to the integration of biological data into the mathematical models, that is one of the main goals of her Visiting Programme at City of Hope.
Yu-Hsuan is currently a graduate student in the Ph.D. in biological sciences program at Irell & Manella Graduate School of Biological Sciences in City of Hope. Yu-Hsuan received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in clinical laboratory sciences and medical biotechnology from National Taiwan University in Taiwan, where he started his research focused on targeted therapy resistance and drug repositioning in leukemia.
With his enthusiasm for combining his previous training in hematology and cancer research with bioinformatics and mathematical modeling, he is currently working with Dr. Ya-Huei Kuo (Department of Hematologic Malignancies Translational Science, Beckman Research Institute) and Dr. Russell Rockne (Department of Computational and Quantitative Medicine, Beckman Research Institute) to uncover the molecular basis of leukemia stem cells and to develop novel therapeutic strategies.
Babgen Manookian, Ph.D. is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Computational and Quantitative Medicine in the Division of Mathematical Oncology and Computational Systems Biology at City of Hope. He works on developing and applying dynamic Bayesian probabilistic algorithms to investigate allosteric mechanisms and causal relationships in transmembrane proteins.
Prior to his fellowship at City of Hope, Babgen completed his doctorate studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he received a Ph.D. in computational chemistry. His thesis focused on investigating the kinetics and thermodynamics of biofuel chemistry within the confined pores of zeolite acid catalysts. Specifically, he tackled the question of how confinement plays a role in key reactions related to the production of biofuels and other energy products. In his research projects he worked with advanced chemistry software in both the static (quantum chemistry) and dynamic (molecular dynamics) realms of modeling. In the latter years of his doctoral work, he developed a microkinetic model of biofuel reactions in zeolites and investigated the concurrence of kinetic and thermodynamic control of product formation. He is currently shifting his focus to a data science approach to study biochemical systems relevant to the field of drug discovery. Babgen also works as a professor of chemistry and has experience teaching at local community colleges in Massachusetts as well as in Los Angeles.
Talant Ruzmetov, Ph.D., is a computational physicist dedicated to advancing our understanding of living organisms, from molecular components-proteins, ligands, DNA, and RNA-to cellular systems. His research integrates deep learning and computational modeling to investigate complex phenomena, including molecular interactions at the atomistic scale, protein conformational dynamics, and the mechanisms driving stem cell differentiation.
Outside the lab, he enjoys playing table tennis on weekends.
Konstancja Urbaniak is a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Sergio Branciamore's group. She embarked on her Ph.D. journey through an A*STAR program, a joint venture between the University of Manchester in the UK and the A*STAR Bioinformatics Institute in Singapore. Her research focused on combining two fields biochemistry and bioinformatics to decipher the code for SUMO reader: substrate interactions. As a postdoctoral fellow, she has been working on employing causal probabilistic models - Bayesian networks to variety omics datasets, including scRNAseq, spatial RNAseq, and FACS to reveal complex and non-linear relationships in biological systems.
Jennifer Rangel Ambriz, Ph.D., is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Computational and Quantitative Medicine within Beckman Research Institute of City of Hope working with Dr. Russell Rockne. She has a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of California, Riverside with a research focus in Mathematical Biology. During her Ph.D., she worked on interdisciplinary projects in developmental biology, bridging experiments and mathematical models to study epithelial tissue development. More specifically, she developed stochastic and multi-scale mechanistic models for studying mechanisms of development of the Drosophilia (fruit fly) wing imaginal disc, the precursor of the wing.
At City of Hope, Dr. Rangel Ambriz is leveraging her background in mathematical and computational modeling to develop mathematical models that help predict Acute Myeloid Leukemai (AML) development, outcome and response to treatment. She hope this research can lead to novel insights that can be used to identify new therapeutic approaches and better patient outcomes.
