
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

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Principal Investigators

Scientific Committee
Executive Board
Scientific co-Chair
Principal Investigator
Adam Resnick, PhD
Adam Resnick is the Director of Data Driven Discovery in Biomedicine (D3b) at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) responsible for leading a multidisciplinary team to build and support a scalable, patient-focused healthcare and educational discovery ecosystem on behalf of all children. He is a

Scientific Committee
Executive Board
Principal Investigator
Phillip Jay Storm, MD
I am chief of the Division of Neurosurgery at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and an attending neurosurgeon specializing in pediatric brain tumors. I operate on every type of brain tumor, but I have a particular interest in low-grade gliomas, medulloblastomas and atypical teratoid rhabdoid t
about this
Institution
Operations Center for the Children’s Brain Tumor Tissue Consortium, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) is currently ranked 1st nationally for their Pediatric Cancer Program by U.S. News & World Report. CHOP’s Biobank is home to the CBTTC’s pediatric brain and CNS tumor biorepository; the largest of its kind on earth.
The Brain Cancer Center at CHOP is staffed by one of the largest pediatric neuro-oncology treatment teams in the U.S., and specializes in a personalized medicine approach in the treatment of childhood brain tumors, neurofibromatosis, and associated tumors. By performing a genomic analysis of every brain tumor, the team is able to zero in on new treatment-relevant pathways for identifying biological factors that predict which patients require intensive versus less intense therapy.
The program has an extensive laboratory and clinical research program designed to identify new therapies for medulloblastoma, gliomas, and infant brain tumors. CHOP also develops a number of institutional clinical trials, and participates in cooperative group clinical trials. Researchers at the Center for Childhood Cancer Research are using state-of-the-art genomic, immunotherapeutic, and targeted molecular approaches to develop new therapies and optimize existing therapies to treat pediatric brain and spinal cord tumors.
meet the
Team

Allison Heath, PhD, MS, BS
Allison Heath is the Director of Data Technology and Innovation responsible for providing technical and collaborative leadership to build platforms for data-driven discovery that span across both research and operational efforts. She provides supervision of the data products and platforms team which

Scientific Committee
Mateusz Koptyra, PhD
Dr. Mateusz Koptyra is a Senior Scientist responsible for initiation, coordination and implementation of scientific projects around the Center’s research units. His team identifies the research demands at the clinical level and creates pipelines for projects to test the research proposals at a pre-c

Executive Board
Jena Lilly, MS, CCRC
Jena Lilly is the Director of Operations and Strategic Planning for the Center for Data Driven Discovery in Biomedicine. Currently, she leads a team of over 30 people in support of international pediatric oncology research consortiums which combined, include over 25 pediatric hospitals. She is also

Todd Hankinson, MD
My research interests focus in 3 areas:1. Pediatric Brain Tumors - I assembled and lead the only multi center consortium in North America that focuses on the improvement of therapies for pediatric craniopharyngioma: Advancing Treatment for Pediatric Craniopharyngioma. We use tissue and clinical data

Scientific Committee
Executive Board
Cassie Kline, MD, MAS
Pediatric Neuro-Oncology, Clinical research, Early phase clinical trials in neuro-oncology, Developmental therapeutics

Thomas De Raedt, PhD
Dr. De Raedt researches pediatric high grade glioma development and aims to understand the involvement of crucial pathways. He investigates pathway interaction, and explores ways to develop therapies through analyzing human tumors, performing cellular studies, and developing accurate mouse models. T

Scientific Committee
Kristina A. Cole, MD, PhD
Kristina Cole, MD, PhD is a pediatric oncologist who has dedicated her career to translational and clinical research, combining her expertise in molecular pathology, cancer genomics, and developmental therapeutics to identify novel treatments for children with cancer. The long-term goal of Dr. Cole’

Kristopher Bosse, MD
Despite the use of intensive multimodal therapy for neuroblastoma, approximately one-half of children still die from this disease. Dr. Bosse's laboratory focuses on the development of new immune-based therapies for this embryonal malignancy of the developing nervous system. Through these studies, Dr

Frank M. Balis, MD
As CHOP’s Institutional Principal Investigator for the Children’s Oncology Group (COG), I oversee the Cancer Center’s substantial contributions to the national clinical research efforts of the COG. We are striving to be one of the premier pediatric oncology clinical research program in the COG.My cl

Executive Board
Michael J. Fisher, MD
Michael J. Fisher, MD, is Chief of the Section of Neuro-Oncology, Director of the Neuro-Oncology Fellowship Program and Director of the Neurofibromatosis Program at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. He has a special interest in brain tumors and neurofibromatosis.Areas of Expertise: Neurofibromato

Scientific Committee
Mariarita Santi-Vicini, MD, PhD
Pediatric brain tumors, developmental neuropathology, neurometabolic conditions and neuromuscular disease

Executive Board
Jane E. Minturn, MD, PhD
Dr. Jane Minturn's research is focused on developing personalized and targeted therapeutics in tumors of the nervous system and understanding the late effects of our therapies in long-term survivors.As part of our approach to identifying new treatments for children with brain tumors, we are members

Peter Madsen, MD

Sharon J. Diskin, PhD
Dr. Diskin is trained in genomics and computational biology and has a multi-disciplinary research program. Along with her colleagues, she couples integrative computational analyses of large-scale data such as next generation DNA/RNA sequencing, single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genotyping, epigen

Zalman Vaksman, PhD

Gonzalo Lopez Garcia, PhD
Computational biology, Genetics and Genomics
Julie Baran

Matthew Hocking, PhD
Behavioral Oncology Research

Lea F. Surrey, MD
Lea F. Surrey, MD, is a pathologist in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

Operations Center
Jennifer Mason, BA
Jennifer Mason is responsible for the overall project and operations management for multiple projects under the CTU division of the D3b Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, including the Children’s Brain Tumor Network (CBTN), and autopsy projects. She is also responsible for ensuring d

Site Coordinator
Shannon Robins, BS
Shannon Robins is a Clinical Research Coordinator responsible for patient consenting and enrollment, clinical data management and quality assurance for the Children’s Brain Tumor Network (CBTN). She also oversees a sub-cohort project focused on Neurofibromatosis II research and assists with the Liqu
Alex Flitter, MA

Stephanie Stefankiewicz, BS

Elizabeth Appert, MS

Site Coordinator
Catherine Sullivan, BS
I started working at D3b in November of 2018 and am the Research Technician for CBTN. I am responsible for all specimens collected for CBTN at CHOP and for managing all incoming shipments from external CBTN sites. For all specimens collected, I accession the samples into our BioRepository Core for l

Angela Viaene, MD, PhD
Angela Viaene, MD, PhD, is a pediatric neuropathologist with the Division of Anatomic Pathology at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

Payal Jain, PhD
Payal Jain is a research scientist responsible for basic and translational research to identify targeted therapeutics for treating pediatric low-grade gliomas (PLGG), with a focus on elucidating molecular mechanisms of response to therapy and subsequent resistance. She also seeks to understand the o

Suzanne P. MacFarland, MD
Dr. MacFarland's research focuses on syndromes that predispose to cancer development in children and adolescents. She has initiated several individual and collaborative research projects, working in pediatric polyposis syndromes and Li-Fraumeni syndrome. She is uncovering novel genomic drivers of d

Ammar Naqvi, PhD
Ammar’s research focuses on combining his interdisciplinary expertise in Bioinformatics, RNA biology and cancer. His broad research interests are focused on understanding regulatory and transcriptional mechanisms that contribute to oncogenesis, tumor evolution and progression in pediatric cancers.

Jo Lynne Rokita, PhD
Jo Lynne’s broad research interests lie in identifying and validating novel coding, noncoding, epigenetic, and/or transcriptional mechanisms contributing to oncogenesis, tumor evolution, and progression/relapse of pediatric high-grade diffuse astrocytic tumors. She combines molecular, genomics, and

Bo Zhang, BS
Bo Zhang is a Bioinformatics Engineer responsible for several initiatives, including The Children’s Brain Tumor Tissue Consortium (CBTTC) and Cavatica. His responsibilities include monitoring and assessing data quality, variant prioritization, data modeling, and statistical analysis. He identifies

Seyed Ali Nabavizadeh, MD
Dr. Ali’s research focuses on multimodality imaging using structural and physiologic MRI imaging with additional PET probes and molecular imaging techniques to better understand the complex nature of brain tumor microenvironment. The ultimate goal of his research is to use imaging and liquid biopsy