Hannah Philipose — the URECA Researcher of the Month for July — is a senior in the Honors College majoring in biology with a minor in health, medicine, and society. She is one of three recipients of a 2022 Sass-Foundation-URECA award that will provide support for her cancer-related research activities this summer working under the mentorship of Markus Seeliger, associate professor in the Department of Pharmacological Sciences.
Thinking back about when she first applied to the Honors College at Stony Brook, Philipose said, “I knew I wanted to be involved in research when I applied to Stony Brook, and one of the reasons that I really wanted to come here is because of how much access students have to research.”
Philipose joined the Seeliger lab in her freshman year. In the lab she investigates the structural and biochemical properties of a novel allosteric binding site of Src kinase via ligand-binding simulations, biochemical assays, stopped-flow kinetics, and X-ray crystallography. She will be completing a senior thesis on the topic before graduating in December 2022. She was a co-author in a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) paper for work characterizing the mechanism of imatinib resistance by a novel Abl kinase mutant.
Philipose had already accrued substantive experience as a high school student working in the Saint-Geniez Lab at the Schepens Eye Research Institute of Harvard Medical School before coming to Stony Brook. She has contributed to papers and conference presentations with the Saint-Geniez group, including a publication in Oxidative Medicine & Cellular Longevity as second author. Philipose also conducted research during the summer before freshman year in the Stony Brook Radiology Department under the mentorship of Tim Duong, where she worked with a team to design a recurrence prediction model for multifocal glioblastoma using open source and Stony Brook Hospital fMRI scans.
Philipose is involved on campus as a member of the Council of Student Advisors to the President, a cabinet member of Stony Brook Young Investigators Review, and a teaching assistant for molecular and cellular biology. She also has experience interning at the Stony Brook Medicine Emergency Department and as a Port Jefferson Volunteer Ambulance Corps EMT.
Read the interview with URECA Director Karen Kernan.
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