2022 Grantees

Maya Emmons-Bell, Ph.D.
MSKCC/Columbia University/Yale University
Maya Emmons-Bell is a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Dr. Juan Manuel Schvartzman at HICCC of Columbia University. After graduating from Tufts University, she returned to her native California to pursue a Ph.D. with Dr. Iswar Hariharan at UC Berkeley. Maya’s graduate work focused on the role of ion channels in developmental morphogenesis, defining dynamic patterns of membrane potential in non-excitable cells, and implicating a class of epithelial sodium channels in Hedgehog signal transduction. After her Ph.D., Maya completed postdoctoral work in the laboratory of Dr. Richard White at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute, where she studied the similarities between growing tumors and regenerating tissues. After a short stint at an early-stage biotech startup, where she leveraged computational tools to explore the immune systems of non-model organisms, Dr. Emmons-Bell returned to academic research, joining the Schvartzman lab, where she is investigating the interplay between metabolic networks and cell fate in development and cancer. Dr. Emmons-Bell joined the department of Cell Biology at Yale University in 2024.

Dr. Emmon-Bell is the Hope Funds for Cancer Research Bilden Family Fellow

Yangpeiwei Huang, PhD
UCSF
Peiwei Huang is a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of David Ruggero at UCSF Medical School. She received her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 2019. She joined the Ruggero lab as a postdoctoral fellow in 2020. Peiwei is interested in the role of the tumor microenvironment (TME) in tumor initiation and progression. To date, most studies have only examined the role of transcription in the tumor microenvironment. However, transcriptomes only partially correlate with their corresponding proteome, whereas post-transcriptional regulation is emerging as a key determinant in sculpting the cellular proteome. Peiwei’s project will focus on the missing link in the program that sustains TME and translational control in non-tumor cells.

Benjamin Walters, Ph.D.
Yale University
Benjamin Walters is postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Dr. Bluma Lesch at Yale University. Ben earned his bachelors degree in Biomedical Sciences from Liverpool John Moores University in 2014. The following year he earned a Masters of Research degree in Translational Medicine at the University of Manchester before pursuing a PhD in the “Epithelial and Developmental Epigenetics lab” of Dr Chin Yan Lim at the A*STAR Institute of Medical Biology located in Singapore. Here, his interest in epigenetics developed as he undertook a project investigating the roles of two histone modifier paralogues in epidermal homeostasis. After completing his PhD in 2020, Ben joined Bluma Lesch’s Lab at Yale University as a postdoctoral associate. His research is focused on understanding how epimutations in the paternal germline can potentiate cancer susceptibility in a transgenerational fashion.