Weill Cornell Medicine
about this
Institution
The Weill Cornell Medicine Pediatric Brain and Spine Center, located on the Upper East Side campus of New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, is nationally recognized for its leadership in the treatment of disorders of the central nervous system in children, particularly brain and spinal cord tumors. It is also the home of the Weill Cornell Medicine Children’s Brain Tumor Project, a research initiative aimed solely at finding new treatment options for rare and often inoperable tumors that strike children and adolescents.
The Clinical Neuro-Oncology Program at the Weill Cornell Brain and Spine Center offers world-class research and medical treatment for cancers affecting the brain and spine. Their experts treat all types of malignant adult and pediatric brain tumors, including primary and metastatic tumors. The program sees hundreds of patients each year with both newly-diagnosed and/or recurrent tumors.
The program offers a wide spectrum of brain tumor clinical trials which make the most recent and promising investigational regimens available to patients who participate in these trials.
The research initiative at the Children’s Brain Tumor Project focuses on exploring pediatric brain tumors from multiple vantage points that integrates key neuroscientific disciplines. This approach enables the lab team to gain a true understanding of these diseases and how to approach treatment more effectively.
The initiative consists of four united research efforts under the same roof - developmental biology, immunotherapy, precision medicine and drug delivery - studying rare pediatric brain tumors from different strategic angles that inform one another in an effort to accelerate cures.
meet the
Team
Estibaliz Lopez-Rodrigo, MD
Investigating the developmental origin and homeostasis of macrophages and the related cell types monocytes and dendritic cells.
Scientific Committee
David Pisapia, MD
Dr. Pisapia's research interests include furthering the molecular characterization of brain tumors in an effort to reveal therapeutically and prognostically meaningful subclassifications of heterogeneous brain tumors that are often lumped into a single diagnostic entity.
Scientific Committee
Christopher E. Mason, PhD
Current Research Interest: New biochemical and computational methods in functional genomics; novel techniques in next-generation sequencing; algorithms for tumor evolution, genome evolution, DNA and RNA modifications; algorithms for genome/epigenome engineering; international standards for clinical-
Scientific Committee
Olivier Elemento, PhD
Big Data analytics with experimentation to develop entirely new ways to help prevent, diagnose, understand, treat and ultimately cure cancerSystems biology of regulatory networks in normal and malignant cellsCancer genomics and precision medicineEpigenomics of cancerTumor genome evolution, anticance
Scientific Committee
Executive Board
Nadia Dahmane, PhD
Dr. Dahmane’s current research focuses a group of proteins called transcription factors that regulate how different genes are expressed during both brain development and brain cancer progression. Her laboratory has identified a critical novel transcription factor protein (called RP58) that is indisp
Nikolay Ivanov, BS
Nikolay's TL1 research will explore deciphering the role of sex disparity in molecular profile and immune microenvironment in pediatric high-grade gliomas.
Rohan Bareja
Andrea Sboner, PhD
Computational analysis of the human transcriptome and proteome
Site Coordinator
Esteban Uceda
I am a recent graduate from Amherst College, where I majored in neuroscience, and started working with the CBTN in 2019. As a research technician and tissue coordinator at Weill Cornell Medicine, I take care of the banking of tissue samples and the generation of cell lines from this tissue for our p
Juan Miguel Mosquera, MD, MSc
Mark M. Souweidane, MD
Dr. Souweidane’s pediatric neurosurgery research lab, which is part of the Children's Brain Tumor Project, is focused on the promise of local delivery in treating brain tumors in children
Rachel Yan, BS
Jana Ivanidze, MD, PhD
Sheila McThenia, MD
Carolina Cocito, PhD
Mylene Branchtein, PhD
Benjamin Hartley, MD
Benjamin Rush Hartley received his medical degree in 2015 from the State University of New York Downstate College of Medicine, where he was inducted into the Gold Foundation Humanism Honor Society and was awarded the Downstate Alumni Association Research Fellowship, multiple American Anatomy Associa
Mark Souweidane, MD
Dr. Souweidane oversees a translational laboratory focusing on improving methods for treating children with incurable brain tumors. His work is nationally regarded for the development of drug delivery techniques for childhood brain tumors that are not amenable to surgical removal. He is the princip