In addition to our efforts in scientific discovery and therapeutic exploration in CH and atherosclerosis, the training and education of emerging investigators is an essential goal of our network.
We expect that the interweaving of basic and clinical studies in network collaborations will provide excellent training for young scientists.
Dr. Nan Wang
graduated from Shandong Medical College in China and then obtained his Ph.D from University of Illinois at Chicago. Following the postdoctoral training in NCI of NIH in Bethesda, MD, he moved to Columbia University Medical Center, working in Dr. Alan Tall’s lab in Department of Medicine. He is currently Associate Professor of Medical Sciences at CUMC. His main research interest is atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. His earlier work was to evaluate the role of HDL metabolism and mechanisms responsible for regulation of cellular cholesterol efflux in atherogenesis. Currently, his research is focused on assessing genetic polymorphisms or mutations that affect atherogenesis by modulating hematopoiesis and inflammatory responses.
Tetsushi Nakao
Wenli Liu
earned her BS and MD degrees from Tianjin Medical University in 2013 and 2018, respectively. She now works as a postdoctoral research scientist studying the molecular mechanisms of clonal hematopoiesis (CH) and CH-associated cardiovascular diseases in the laboratory of Dr. Alan Tall at Columbia University. Her current focus is modeling the effect of Jak2VF on erythropoiesis and atherosclerosis. Her hope is that her research will continue to contribute to the groundwork for developing cardiac therapies that will benefit the tens of millions of patients who suffer from cardiovascular disease. When not at the bench, Dr. Liu enjoys cooking spicy foods.
Amy Lin
obtained her HBSc at the Department of Immunology, University of Toronto and her MD/PhD studies under the supervision of Prof. Tak Mak at the University of Toronto. Upon completion of Internal Medicine Residency training at the University of Toronto, she moved to Boston for Cardiology Fellowship training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School. She is now a postdoctoral research fellow in Cardiovascular Medicine and Hematology with Prof. Benjamin Ebert, at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Dana Farber Cancer Institute.
Kanako Wakahasi
is a hematologist and postdoctoral fellow in the Hidalgo laboratory at CNIC. She has studied hematopoietic niche in bone marrow and myelofibrosis/osteosclerosis complicated with myeloproliferative neoplasm. She would like to reveal how innate immune cells communicate with the hematopoietic niche in bone marrow, and whether this process is altered during Clonal Hematopoiesis.
Jayakrishanan Gopakumar
is at Stanford University with Dr. Siddhartha Jaiswal’s lab, where he is interested in exploring how loss of function of epigenetic modifiers with opposing functions, namely Tet2 and DNMT3a, converge in a subset of hematopoietic stem cells on a similar atherogenic phenotype
Iván Ballesteros
did his graduate studies on Biology and Master studies at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, working on the role of innate immunity in stroke under the supervision of Dr. María Angeles Moro. After a postdoctoral position at the Kings College London and at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center he joined the laboratory of Dr. Andrés Hidalgo to explore the heterogeneity of neutrophils under homeostasis.
Maximilian Mauler
received his PhD in Biology from the University-Heart Center Freiburg in 2017 working on platelet-leukocyte interactions in cardiovascular diseases (CVD). He is currently working as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Prof. Soehnlein at the Institute for Cardiovascular Prevention in Munich. His scientific focus is to understand how clonal hematopoiesis (CH) shapes neutrophils and their inflammatory profile during CVD like atherosclerosis or myocardial infarction. He tries to answer the question how the observations of CH and anti-inflammatory treatment can be intertwined to develop novel, preventive treatment options for patients suffering from CVD. Aside from the bench, Dr. Mauler can be found on a basketball court and, more recently, on a golf course with less than moderate success.
Andrea Rubio
is a PhD student at Andrés Hidalgo’s lab. She is currently applying computational biology and bioinformatics to take a new perspective on the role of neutrophils and other myeloid leukocytes in the homeostatic tissue. She also loves developing tools that can be useful to other researchers.
Patrick Ampomah
received his bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry from the University of Ghana, Accra in 2012. In 2018, he completed his PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology of Inflammation at the School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, where he investigated the role of formyl peptide receptor 2 in acute Influenza A virus infection. In 2018, he joined the Tabas laboratory at Columbia University as a post-doctoral scientist with a keen interest in understanding the molecular mechanisms linking Clonal Haematopoiesis (CH) to defective inflammation re