My name is Cameron – I'm a researcher at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Boston Children's Hospital, where I work as a postdoc in the labs of Leonard Zon and Franziska Michor.
I'm interested in the biology of tumorigenesis. Cancer usually begins when one rogue cell starts dividing inappropriately, producing a benign precursor lesion or "field" which, over many years, may evolve into a cancerous tumor. Using the zebrafish as a model organism due to its transparent skin, rapid development, and accessible embryos for mosaic genetic engineering, I work to better understand this benign-to-malignant transition by mimicking the conditions of tumorigenesis in vivo. My ultimate goal is to help us realize a future where most cancers can be eliminated before they become life-threatening.
My PhD work at MIT focused on understanding how kinase-addicted cancers resist therapy and on building new tools to analyze molecular pathways and dependencies in patient tumor samples. I use a variety of cutting-edge experimental tools including live imaging, synthetic biology, and mass spectrometry, and I enjoy coupling data from these tools with principled mathematical and statistical modeling to tackle fundamental questions in cancer biology.