Congratulations to Kevin Hoffer-Hawlik, a Biomedical Engineering PhD candidate co-mentored by Elham Azizi and José L. McFaline-Figueroa who was awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship for his project titled "Modeling dynamic tumor-immune interactions in melanoma in response to immunotherapy using machine learning and multiplexed scRNA-seq experiments."
In collaboration with Benjamin Izar’s group at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, Kevin Hoffer-Hawlik proposes an integrative framework to understand immune cell state dynamics and tumor-immune cell interactions during and after immunotherapy in melanoma, specifically by using machine learning methods to integrate scRNA-seq and spatial transcriptomics data, reconstructing CD8+ T cell activation/exhaustion trajectories, and characterizing and experimentally validating CD8+ T cell and tumor cell crosstalk.
The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited United States institutions.
