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 received her M.D. from Oxford University, UK. She did her medical training 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 analyses of pediatric autoimmune disease and human cancer, uncovering novel immune cell lineages with distinct roles in immune-regulation and tissue homeostasis. Work in her lab addresses how transcriptional regulators integrate environmental cues to drive cellular diversity within the immune system. The goal is to understand how changes in the tissue environment influence immune development and how dysregulation can lead to disease, with a particular focus on pediatric autoimmunity and cancer.

Chrysothemis has received numerous awards, including a Wellcome Trust PhD Fellowship, Wellcome Trust post-doctoral Clinical Research Fellowship, and presently both the Josie Robertson Investigator award and a Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy Senior Fellowship.

Yollanda Franco Parisotto
Senior Research Technician, 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.

Blossom Akagbosu
Research Technician

Blossom is a recent graduate from the College of Staten Island with a BS in Biology. She previously interned at the NYS Institute for Basic Research and the New York Stem Cell Foundation Research Institute. Blossom joined the lab as a research technician in February 2021.