My name is Cam – 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 early tumorigenesis; I work to improve our understanding of how malignant tumors gradually evolve from precancerous fields and lesions, using zebrafish as a model system due to their transparent skin and accessible zygotic embryos for genetic manipulation. I love using fluorescence microscopy, chemical/genetic perturbations, computational modeling, and mass spectrometry to solve important problems in cancer biology.

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As a PhD student and Ludwig Center Graduate Fellow in Forest White's lab at MIT's Koch Institute, I studied the molecular events that allow tumor cells to tolerate and adapt to targeted therapy, using mass spectrometry-based proteomics and with a focus on kinase inhibitors and protein phosphorylation (Flower and White, PNAS 2026; Flower and Liu et al., Cell Systems 2025). In collaboration with Thermo Fisher Scientific, I helped build new targeted mass spectrometry methods to directly measure oncogenic signaling networks in human tumor biopsies (Stopfer, Flower et al., Cancer Research 2021). I also enjoyed teaching mathematical modeling of biochemical systems to MIT undergrads, and I briefly worked on the computational biology team at BioNTech where I contributed to efforts around immuno-oncology target discovery.

I earned my BSE in biomedical engineering as a first-generation undergraduate at the University of Connecticut, where I worked in Pramod Srivastava's lab at UConn's Neag Comprehensive Cancer Center on projects related to neoantigen presentation and immunotherapy response. I also spent some time at NIH's Systems Biology Center in Mark Knepper's lab where I built multi-omic workflows to discover proteins derived from unannotated small open reading frames (Flower et al., Physiol Genomics 2020). I received the Goldwater Scholarship in 2016 for my undergraduate research.

My current work is supported by a fellowship from the Department of Data Science and the Center for Cancer Evolution at Dana-Farber, and I am affiliated with Harvard's departments of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology and Biostatistics. I've served as a peer reviewer for Cell Genomics, Journal of Cell Biology, and eLife. You can find media coverage for some of my research at Inside Precision Medicine, MIT News, Medical Xpress, and PNAS Journal Club.