Chrysothemis Brown MBBS PhD
Principal Investigator
Chrysothemis Brown is an Assistant Professor at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and an Assistant Attending physician in the department of Pediatrics. Chrysothemis holds appointments in the Immunology and Microbial Pathogenesis (IMP) program at Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences and the Gerstner Sloan Kettering Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences.
Chrysothemis did her undergraduate medical training at Oxford University and University College London, UK. She trained in Pediatrics in London and obtained her Ph.D in Immunology under the mentorship of Randy Noelle. Her work focused on the role of a dietary metabolite, vitamin A, in the regulation of T cell differentiation.
For her post-doctoral research, Chrysothemis joined the lab of Alexander Rudensky to pursue studies in the transcriptional and epigenetic regulation of immune cell fate. There she discovered novel dendritic cell subsets and their transcriptional regulators, both in mice and humans. Alongside this, she pioneered single-cell transcriptomic studies of pediatric autoimmune disease and human cancer, uncovering a new lineage of antigen-presenting cells that instructs immune tolerance to the intestinal microbiota in early life. Work in her lab addresses how the tissue environment influences immune development and how dysregulation can lead to disease, with a particular focus on early life immune development and mucosal tolerance, autoimmunity and cancer.
Chrysothemis has received numerous awards, including the NIH/NIAID New Innovator Award, Pew Biomedical Scholar Award, Josie Robertson Young Investigator Award, Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy Senior Fellowship, V Foundation Pediatric Scholar award and Wellcome Trust Post-doctoral Clinical Research Fellowship.
Jinwoo Nah
Postdoctoral Fellow
Jinwoo received his B.S. in Biological Sciences and Ph.D. in Molecular Immunology from Seoul National University, Republic of Korea. During his Ph.D., he studied transcriptional regulation of T cell exhaustion in cancer. Since joining The Brown Lab in November 2023, he has been investigating the role of tolerogenic antigen-presenting cells in cancer.
Gayathri Shibu
Graduate Student, Kravis WiSE Fellow
Gaya received her B.S. in Bioengineering from VIT University-Vellore, India, and Masters degree in Biomedical Engineering from Cornell University, Ithaca. She then spent three years as a post-baccalaureate researcher at Weill Cornell Medicine/Hospital for Special Surgery, working on the molecular mechanisms of transcriptional regulation in macrophages, before joining the IMP PhD program at Weill Cornell. Gaya joined the Brown lab in 2021 to investigate the transcriptional regulation of tolerogenic programs within thymic and peripheral Aire-expressing antigen presenting cells. In 2023 Gaya was awarded the Kravis Women in Science Endeavor Graduate Fellowship.
Logan Fisher
Graduate Student
Logan earned his BS degree in Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology from the University of California, Santa Cruz, before completing further studies at the Center for Immunity and Immunotherapies, Seattle Children’s Research Institute, as well as the Laboratory of Parasitic Diseases, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIH. Logan is now a Weill Cornell graduate student and joined the Brown lab in 2021 to work on understanding the division of labor between newly identified dendritic cell subsets, and how the local tissue microenvironment shapes dendritic cell heterogeneity and function during homeostasis and inflammation.
Yoselin Paucar Iza
Graduate Student, HHMI Gilliam Fellow
After receiving her B.S. in Forensic Science from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Yoselin went on to complete the Post-baccalaureate Research Education Program at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where she studied autophagy signaling in T cells. Yoselin is a graduate student in the Weill Cornell’s IMP Program and joined the Brown lab in 2021 to investigate the maternal and environmental cues that promote immune tolerance to the microbiota in early life. In 2023 Yoselin was awarded the HHMI Gilliam Fellowship.
Yun Lo
Graduate Student
Yun received her B.S. in Biotechnology and Laboratory Science in Medicine from National Yang-Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan, and her master’s degree in Immunology from National Taiwan University. She went on to study the mechanisms of co-stimulatory receptors in CAR-T cell persistence as a research technician at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center prior to joining the Weill Cornell IMP PhD program. Yun joined the Brown lab in 2023 to study Thetis cells and mucosal tolerance.
Vanja Cabric
Pediatric Hematology-Oncology Fellow
Vanja received her B.S. in Genetics and Biochemistry at the University of Toronto, Canada. She went on to complete her Medical degree at McMaster University, followed by specialty training in Pediatrics at the University of Toronto. She is currently a Pediatric Hematology-Oncology fellow at MSKCC-NYPWC. Vanja joined the Brown lab in 2022 to study how the developing pediatric immune system shapes immune responses to solid organ tumours arising in infancy and childhood.
Anushka Yadav
Computational Biology Research Assistant
Anushka earned her Bachelor's degree in Biotechnology Engineering from Manipal Institute of Technology, India, and later pursued a Master's degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Southern California, CA. During her master's, her thesis was focused on 'Benchmarking of Computational Tools for Ancestry prediction using RNA-seq data,' under the guidance of her advisor, Dr. Serghei Mangul. Anushka joined The Brown Lab in June 2023 as a Computational Biology Research Assistant, collaborating with research scientists to develop and implement computational workflows for analyzing high throughput sequencing data, including scRNA-seq and ATAC-seq
Yollanda Franco Parisotto
Research Assistant, Lab Manager
Yollanda received her Master’s degree in Health Sciences from the University of Sao Francisco, Brazil, and completed further studies in the Department of Neurology, University of Sao Paulo. Her research centered on the identification of novel therapeutic targets in cancer with a particular interest in tumor metabolic pathways, angiogenesis, and immunotherapy. Since joining the Brown lab in 2021 she has been studying dendritic cells in cancer, investigating their role in tumor progression and metastatic disease.
Blossom Akagbosu
Research Technician
Blossom graduated from the College of Staten Island with a BS in Biology in and joined the lab as a research technician in February 2021. Since joining the lab, she has been investigating the role of newly identified early life antigen presenting cells in tolerance to commensal bacteria.
Eliyambuya Baker
Post-baccalaureate MSKCC Bridge Scholar
Eliyambuya earned her B.S. in Biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2023. At UNC she researched the role APC/C plays in the regulation of the transition from G1 to S phase of the cell cycle with the goal of developing and improving cancer therapies. This inspired her to join the Brown Lab as a Bridge Scholar in the MSKCC post-baccalaureate research program where she will be investigating the role of breast milk derived factors in regulating immune tolerance in early life.
Zihan Zhao
Research Technician
Zihan earned her B.S. in Biological Sciences at Tsinghua University, China, in 2023. Her undergraduate research explored mechanisms underlying reprogramming of chromatin structure during mouse spermatogenesis. Since joining the Brown Lab, she has been investigating how the gut microbiota shapes Thetis cell development, as well as the broader role of Thetis cells in microbiota tolerance.