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.

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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 (PNAS 2026) and adapt to (Cell Systems 2025) kinase inhibitor therapeutics. In collaboration with Thermo Fisher Scientific, I helped build high-sensitivity assays to directly measure proteome-wide tyrosine kinase activity within patient tumor biopsies (Cancer Research 2021). I enjoyed teaching mathematical modeling of biochemical systems to MIT undergrads (20.320 on OpenCourseWare), and I worked as a graduate intern at BioNTech where I contributed to computational 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 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 (Physiological 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.