Spotlight on emerging science: Postdoc presentation

Blackberrie Eddins is a PGY-3 general surgery resident at UCSD currently working as a post-doctoral fellow as part of the Cancer Therapeutics Training (CT2) program. Her research focus is on fluorescence-guided gastrointestinal and endocrine surgery, and she is also working on a clinical trial using AI to determine the histopathology of colon polyps during colonoscopy. 

Thomas Hoang is a PhD-trained postdoctoral fellow co-mentored by Dr. Ludmil Alexandrov and Dr. Silvio Gutkind. His research focuses on understanding the oncogenic signaling mechanisms that drive therapeutic resistance and malignant progression in head and neck cancers. He completed his undergraduate training at Southern Connecticut State University, followed by a two-year post-baccalaureate program at Yale University, and earned his PhD at UC San Diego under the mentorship of Dr. Gutkind, where he began his work in head and neck cancer biology. His current research aims to understand how oral premalignancies transition into oral cancers, with the goal of identifying actionable prognostic biomarkers that can ultimately improve outcomes for patients with head and neck cancer.