Jalal Ahmed Khan, MD, PhD, is a radiation oncologist in the Department of Radiation Oncology and a physician scientist with a laboratory in the Precision Immunology Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS). Jalal is also a member of the Icahn Genomics Institute. Jalal studied biomedical engineering at Columbia University and then immunology and developmental biology as part of the combined MD/PhD training program at ISMMS. He completed his graduate work with Paul Frenette and Miriam Merad studying the expansion of hematopoietic stem cells. He completed his internship in internal medicine at Northwell Health and the ABR Holman Research Pathway residency program in radiation oncology at the ISMMS. During residency, he conducted research with Miriam Merad and Michel Sadelain to modulate the tumor immune microenvironment with radiotherapy to improve the anti-tumor activity of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells. The lab aims to design novel CAR T cell therapies informed by the study of myeloid cells that play a key role in shaping the composition of the tumor microenvironment and the response to cancer immunotherapy.
Maki Ishibashi, BA (Biology)
Maki Ishibashi is a research technician in the Ahmed lab, working to better target solid tumors using a combination of radiation therapy and CAR T therapy. She graduated from Columbia University in May of 2023, with a Bachelor of Arts in biology. During her undergraduate years, she worked in Dr. Rodney Rothstein’s lab studying double-stranded break repair processes using budding yeast. Over the summer of 2022, she went abroad to study the SMC5/6 complex in Dr. Katsuhiko Shirahige’s lab at The University of Tokyo, where she was introduced to more translational works performed using various model organisms. During senior year, she became interested in the therapeutic potentials of the immune system and decided to join the Ahmed lab upon graduating. This upcoming summer, she will be starting her MD/PhD training (location TBD!), where she plans to do her PhD in cancer immunology. Fun fact: She almost pursued a dance career at the Beijing Dance Theatre, but decided to attend college instead. Hobbies: During her free time, she likes attending dance classes in the city (plug for Ballet Arts at Carnegie Hall!). She also enjoys reading, hiking, and cooking (basically wet lab, right?).
Sophia Navarre, BA (Biology)
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
Former Members:
2022-2023 Oscar Padilla MD, now Asstant Professor of Radiation Oncology at MSH
2022 Janaki Nair, now at Columbia College
2019-2020 Merouane Ounadjela B.S. – research technician
2020-2022 Achuth Nair B.S. – research technician, now PhD Candidate at Gerstner Sloan Kettering Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at MSKCC
