Predoctoral Trainees
Ceire Hay
Mentor: Sarah E. Henrickson, MD, PhD
Ceire Hay is an Immunology doctoral candidate in the lab of Dr. Sarah Henrickson. Ceire earned her BS from West Chester University in May 2016. Following this, she joined the laboratory of Dr. Katelyn Byrne at the University of Pennsylvania where she studied mechanisms of CD8 T cell trafficking in the context of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma. In 2019, Ceire joined the Immunology Graduate Group and continued to explore her interests in T cell dysfunction under the mentorship of Dr. Henrickson. Ceire is interested in understanding the impact of obese asthma on both CD4 and CD8 T cell effector function. Using both human in vitro and mouse in vivo models, Ceire is employing a multimodal research approach that includes spectral flow cytometry, mass spectrometry, lipidomics and proteomics to better understand how adipose-secreted factors drive altered T cell function in children with obese asthma.
Ryan Paulukinas
Mentor: Trevor Penning, PhD
Ryan came to UPenn in June 2018, where he joined the Pharmacology Graduate Group. He completed his BS in Pharmacology and Toxicology from the University of the Sciences in May 2018 with a double minor in mathematics and statistics. He joined Dr. Trevor Penning’s lab in April 2019, where he is researching the mechanism of excess androgen activity that is linked to polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS). He is interested in steroid metabolic pathways, and how the dysfunction particularly of aldo-keto reductase family 1member C3 (AKR1C3) may be leading to the disease state. He wants to study both androgen levels and AKR1C3 expression levels to understand how the metabolic schemes are being altered in adipose tissue. Exploring different kind of endocrine disrupting chemicals that are androgen activating may be able to help elucidate the mechanism leading to a lipotoxic profile ultimately due to excess androgen activity.
Ross Pirnie
Mentor: Ian Blair, PhD
Ross Pirnie is a pharmacology doctoral candidate in lab of Dr. Ian Blair. Ross graduated from Bucknell University with a B.S. in biochemistry/cell biology in May 2017. His undergraduate thesis focused on using NMR to understand the structural dynamics and chiral properties of bile salt micelles. Ross is currently investigating post-translational protein modifications as potential biomarkers of drug induced liver injury. Specifically, he is using high-resolution mass spectrometry to detect context-specific modifications on high mobility group box 1 protein following acetaminophen-induced liver injury in model systems.
Postdoctoral Trainees
Lisa Bottalico, PhD
Mentor: Aalim Weljie, PhD
Lisa is a postdoctoral researcher in the Weljie lab in the Department of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics. Lisa joined the lab in September 2017 after completing her Ph.D. in Pharmacology and CEET’s Certificate Program in Environmental Health Sciences at University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include using metabolomics workflows to investigate cell and organ-level metabolic impacts of endocrine disrupting chemicals and investigating the potential for environmental pollutant exposure to impact circadian clock function. Additional research interests include applications of metabolomics to environmental health and exposome research and as well as multi-omics data integration for adverse outcome pathway modeling and chemical safety assessment.
Joseph Romano, PhD
Mentor: Jason Moore, PhD
Joseph Romano is a postdoctoral researcher in the Computational Genetics Laboratory (led by Dr. Jason Moore), where he studies artificial intelligence applications in computational toxicology. He joined the CGL in June 2019, shortly after earning his PhD from Columbia University, where he developed computational tools to discover therapeutic effects from proteins found in animal venoms. At Penn, his work involves constructing information networks and graph databases that model downstream effects in the human body following specific toxic exposures, as well as developing new machine learning algorithms that identify patterns in these networks underlying mechanisms of human disease. Dr. Romano is an advocate for open science and the free software movement.
Anthony Su, PhD
Mentor: Trevor Penning, PhD
Anthony Su joined Dr. Trevor Penning’s laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania in July 2020 as a postdoctoral researcher. Prior to his postdoctoral career, Dr. Su received his Ph.D. in Toxicology in 2020 from the University of Michigan, where he examined metabolic mechanisms of trichloroethylene toxicity in mammalian models of pregnancy. In the Penning laboratory, Dr. Su researches the role of aldo-keto reductases in the nitroreduction and carcinogenicity of select nitroarenes that are diesel exhaust constituents, including 1-nitropyrene and 1,8-dinitropyrene. Because the nitroreduction of many nitroarenes is thought to involve the formation of carcinogenic metabolites, Dr. Su plans to modulate the nitroreduction of these nitroarenes to investigate altered toxicity. Dr. Su is passionate about implementation of Inclusion, Equity, and Diversity (IDE) principles within academia and rigor and reproducibility in science.
J. Dylan Weissenkampen (van Kampen), PhD
Mentor: Maja Bucan, PhD
Dylan is a postdoctoral researcher in the Bucan lab in the Genetics department, where he studies autism spectrum disorder (ASD) risk factors. He joined the Bucan lab in January 2021, after obtaining his PhD in Neuroscience from the Pennsylvania State University where he conducted research into integrating multiple modalities to investigate smoking behaviors. In the Bucan lab, Dylan investigates the interplay between genetics and environmental factors on ASD risk and symptomology.
