Dr. Bigdeli has received her M.D. degree from University of Azad Tehran, Iran in 2005 and moved to states the same year. She has obtained her American Board C ertification (ECFMG certified) in Aug. 2008 and has been working as a research assistant since Oct. 2008. Her work with TVG will be focuesed on the studies under Dr. Vy Lai. Her goal is to pursue her education in internal medicine and later a fellowship in oncology.

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Dr. Broussard received her MD from Cornell University Medical College in New York. She then completed residency in Internal Medicine, followed by fellowship in Gastroenterology at the University of Washington. She works as an attending at Harborview Medical Center. Liz joined the TVG in May 2009 and will be working to develop a panel of autoantibodies that can effectively discriminate patients with colon cancer from controls.

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Dr. Cecil received her BS in Microbiology from Michigan State University in 1996. After graduation, she joined a B-cell biology lab at The Scripps Research Institute focused on rheumatologic diseases. She then moved over to the UC San Diego’s Rheumatology, Allergy and Immunology Department in 2000 and worked as a technician. In 2008 she received her Ph.D. from UC San Diego in Molecular Pathology examining the role of non-traditional inflammatory cytokines in the modulation of the pathogenesis and progression of osteoarthritis. Currently Dr. Cecil is working with TVG on the development and characterization of peptide-specific vaccines for breast and ovarian cancers.

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Dr. Dang received her Ph.D. in Immunology from University of Surrey, United Kingdom in 1996. She completed her postdoctoral studies in the Reproductive Immunologic Laboratory at Swedish Medical Center, Denver, Colorado in 2000. Dr. Dang is an expert T cell biologist. She has extensive experience in projects related to T cell therapy in both academia and industry. Within the Tumor Vaccine Group she is involved with the development of adoptive T cell immunotherapy for the treatment of metastatic breast cancer, including establishing ex vivo T cell expansion as a GMP technique.

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Dan earned his doctoral degree in Biology at UC San Diego. With a fellowship from the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation, he completed his postdoctoral training The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics. Dan has several years of experience performing cancer drug discovery research in the biotechnology industry. He brings expertise in biochemistry and cancer cell biology to address the challenges of cancer vaccine development at TVG.

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Gregory Holt is a fellow in the Department of Pulmonary/Critical Care Medicine at the University of Washington. He received his M.D./Ph.D. from Loyola University in Chicago graduating in 2002 working with W. Martin Kast Ph.D. during graduate school. His thesis evaluated tumor vaccine strategies towards prostate specific antigen modeling both the targeting of a self antigen and working within the HLA A*0201 haplotype. He completed his residency in Internal Medicine at Georgetown University and served as chief medicine resident for one year before joining the Pulmonary Division at the UW. His research interests involve tumor vaccines targeting non small cell lung cancers in both a prophylactic and therapeutic manner.

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Emily Jackson completed her B.S. degree at the University of San Francisco where she majored in Biology, taking courses that emphasized in cell and molecular biology. While an undergrad she worked as a research assistant in the schools virology lab studying the human Cytomegalovirus (hCMV) for a year and a half reinforcing her interest in disease research.

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Dr. Vy Phan Lai received her B.Sc. in Biology, with a minor in English, at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. After graduation, she joined the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where she conducted research on the biology of liver cancer and other gastrointestinal cancers. In 2004, Dr. Lai received her Ph.D. in Tumor Biology from the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine (in Dr. Richard Vile’s laboratory), where she developed new dendritic cell-based therapies for the treatment of various cancers, including melanoma. At the Tumor Vaccine Group, Dr. Lai continues to pursue her interests in tumor immunology, focusing on vaccine-based and T cell-based therapies for breast cancer. Dr. Lai’s research is centered on the development of HER2/neu peptide-specific CD4+ T cells from neu-transgenic mice for adoptive T cell therapy studies. It is her hope that the preclinical investigations will help to advance our understanding of HER2/neu specific T cell infusions as a potentially beneficial treatment for advanced stage breast cancer patients.

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Mr. Neeley received his B.S. in biology form the University of Michigan in 1997. As an undergraduate he did work on an antisense resistance strategy to the plant viarus Chino del Tomate with Dr. John C. Thomas. He joined the laboratory of Dr. Elizabeth Petty at the University of Michigan as a research associate and laboratory manager in 1997 and studied the genetics of breast cancer tumor suppressors on the chromosome 17q25. In 2002 he joined the laboratory of Dr. Kenneth Pienta as the University of Michigan as a research associate where he studied the cellular mechanisms of prostate cancer metastasis, the development of hormone refractory prostate cancer and the immune cell contributions to the homing and growth of prostate cancer at metastatic sties.

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Dr. Wu received her Ph.D. in Cell and Molecular Biology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She completed her post-doctoral training at UW-Madison and the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center. During her tenure at the University of Michigan, she studied genetics and cell biology of inflammatory breast cancer. She has extensive expertise on molecular biology, bioinformatics, cell biology, and anti-tumor drug development. Currently she is working on the identification of tumor biomarkers and the development of multi-antigen tumor vaccines.

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Yi received a Master’s degree in biochemistry from Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry, Chinese Academy of Science. After a few years as a visiting scientist in Dr. George Stamatoyannopoulos’s lab in Division of Medical Genetics, University of Washington, he joined Dr. Hellstrom’s lab working on tumor antigen discovery and early detection of human tumors as well as tumor-based therapy of mouse melanoma models.

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