Members

Maria Teresa Landi, M.D., Ph.D.

Senior Advisor for Genomic Epidemiology

Dr. Landi is a Senior Investigator at Integrative Tumor Epidemiology Branch (ITEB), Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics (DCEG).

Dr. Landi received an M.D. summa cum laude from the University of Milan, Italy, and was trained in oncology and general medicine at the San Raffaele Hospital, University of Milan. She received a Ph.D. in occupational medicine and industrial hygiene, subgroup of molecular epidemiology, from an Italian University Consortium in 1993, and qualified for the associate professorship in occupational medicine and industrial hygiene in the Italian Universities in 1998. Dr. Landi received tenure in the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics (DCEG), NCI in 2006. She is an Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland. Dr. Landi has assembled a team of investigators, including intramural and extramural scientists, to conduct complex germline and somatic genomic analyses in population studies. In 2021, she was appointed Senior Advisor for Genomic Epidemiology in DCEG’s Trans-Divisional Research Program.

She leads large-scale multidisciplinary research projects primarily on genetic and environmental determinants of lung cancer and melanoma, including the Sherlock-Lung study.

Phuc Hoang, Ph.D.

Bioinformatician

Dr. Phuc Hoang received his Master in Biochemistry from the University of Oxford and Ph.D. in cancer genetics/bioinformatics from The Institute of Cancer Research, London in 2020. He is currently working on analyzing DNA methylation and Radiology data in the Sherlock-Lung project.

Azhar Khandekar

Ph.D. Student

Azhar Khandekar is a Graduate Partnership Program (GPP) fellow, who is currently completing his degree in the bioinformatics and systems biology Ph.D. program at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). He previously worked at the NIH on integrating DNA methylation and somatic mutation data to study mechanisms of mutagenesis, and he is currently working on analyzing copy number variation and structural variants in normal and tumor genomes.

As a joint ITEB and UCSD doctoral student, he is working on his dissertation research under the supervision of Dr. Landi and Ludmil Alexandrov, Ph.D., UCSD. Mr. Khandekar is interested in integrating large-scale omics datasets to ultimately elucidate the biological mechanisms that drive cancer formation and progression.

Alyssa Klein, M.S.

Bioinformatician

Alyssa Klein received her M.S. in Bioinformatics from Hood College in 2020. She works as a bioinformatician to support the Integrative Tumor Epidemiology Branch (ITEB), helping to manage and analyze large genomic databases from epidemiological and clinical studies.

John McElderry, M.S.

Bioinformatician

John received his M.S. in Bioinformatics from Johns Hopkins University in 2020. He works on the Sherlock-Lung project with a current focus on characterizing the lung microbiome and mitochondrial genome in lung cancer.

Jian Sang, Ph.D.

Postdoctoral Fellow

Jian Sang, Ph.D., joined the Integrative Tumor Epidemiology Branch (ITEB) as a postdoctoral fellow in September 2019. Dr. Sang earned his Ph.D. in bioinformatics from the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2019. Under the mentorship of Professor Zhang Zhang, his doctoral studies focused on public transcriptome and epigenome data integration and analysis.

In ITEB, Dr. Sang works with Dr. Landi and Tongwu Zhang, Ph.D., staff scientist, to investigate lung cancer pathogenesis by deep mining of whole genome/exome sequencing data. Dr. Sang’s current research interest focuses on the identification of novel predisposing genomic signals using large-scale population-based genomic data and the exploration of their potential clinical applications.

Tongwu Zhang, Ph.D.

Staff Scientist

Dr. Tongwu Zhang received his Ph.D. in bioinformatics from Zhejiang University, China, in June 2012. He conducted part of his doctoral research at the Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Science, where he worked on whole-genome assembly and RNA-sequencing analysis. Before joining NCI, he was a visiting scholar at the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Dr. Zhang joined the Laboratory of Translational Genomics (LTG) as a visiting postdoctoral fellow in July 2012, under the mentorship of Kevin M. Brown, Ph.D. He became a staff scientist in the Integrative Tumor Epidemiology Branch (ITEB) in October 2017.

Dr. Zhang has received numerous awards for his work, including an NCI Director’s Innovation Award in 2013, a Fellowship Achievement Award for Excellence in 2014, a DCEG Intramural Research Award in 2015, a DCEG Fellow Award for Research Excellence (DFARE) in 2016, a DCEG Outstanding Research Paper by a Staff Scientist distinction in 2019, and a winning entry in the 2016, 2019, and 2020 DCEG Informatics Tool Challenge.

Dr. Zhang’s research focuses on analyzing, integrating, and interpreting multi-omics data for both cancer genomic and genetic studies. He leads a study developing a cell-type specific QTL resource of primary melanocytes to characterize melanoma susceptibility loci. He also leads the genomic analyses and develops new bioinformatics tools and pipelines for Sherlock-Lung.

Wei Zhao, Ph.D.

Research Fellow

Wei Zhao, Ph.D., joined the Integrative Tumor Epidemiology Branch (ITEB) as a postdoctoral fellow in November 2018 and was promoted to a research fellow in September 2020. Dr. Zhao earned her Ph.D. in bioinformatics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill under the supervision of Dr. Chuck Perou in 2014. Her doctoral research focused on characterization of the genomic and clinical heterogeneity of breast cancer subtypes using deep- sequencing and microarray.

Prior to joining NCI, Dr. Zhao conducted postdoctoral training in the Department of Systems Biology in MD Anderson Cancer Center for four years. Working with Dr. Gordon Mills and Dr. Han Liang, she identified predictive molecular markers and drug targets for rational combinatorial therapy in gynecologic cancers, and developed computational tools for analysis of proteomic data.

Dr. Zhao is working with Dr. Landi to investigate the etiology and progression of lung cancer in never smokers through a comprehensive genomic analysis and clinical and epidemiologic assessment. Her current research focuses on transcriptomics and tumor microenvironment.