Lab Members

Principal Investigator

Lawrence Kwong, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Translational Molecular Pathology

Kwong received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, then completed his postdoctoral fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and later MD Anderson. He previously worked primarily with genetically engineered mouse models of colon cancer and melanoma, and the laboratory is now expanding to patient samples, patient-derived xenografts and big data analysis to rationally identify new anti-cancer therapies for both the first-line and counter-resistance settings.

Karim Koleilat, M.D. 
Karim’s interests lie in cancer class discovery using various pathway enrichment tools to pinpoint tumorigenic drivers and immune activators for drug targeting as well as validating these findings on the bench. His current work is aimed primarily at bladder and colon cancer.

Main focus: colon cancer, melanoma, bioinformatics

Young-Ho Jung, Ph.D.
Young-Ho had a background of fly sex determination genetics during his Ph.D. at Texas A&M. Currently, his work in the Kwong Lab mostly focuses on cholangiocarcinoma. His major research interest is genetic and epigenetic regulation of oncogenes and tumor suppressors.

Main focus: cholangiocarcinoma, KRAS signaling, chromatin modifiers

Yan Zhu, Ph.D.
Yan received his Ph.D. degree from MD Anderson Cancer Center in the Kwong Lab and now works as a postdoc. He is interested in exploring the underlying mechanisms of and novel combinations against cholangiocarcinoma.

Main focus: cholangiocarcinoma, gallbladder carcinoma, pathology, genomics

Pooja Shukla, Ph.D.
Pooja earned her doctoral degree from SGPGIMS, India, in 2019, specializing in molecular onco-pathology in biliary tract cancer. Driven by a deep interest in cholangiocarcinoma, she joined the lab in 2022. Her current research focuses on exploring the lineage plasticity and the relationship between histo-morphological and molecular intratumor-heterogeneity within the tumor microenvironment.

Main focus: cholangiocarcinoma, lineage plasticity, intratumor heterogeneity, molecular histopathology

Marwan Mohammed, Ph.D.
Marwan's academic journey spans a Bachelor's in pharmaceutical sciences from Aden, Yemen, a Master’s in India and a Ph.D. in pharmacology from China, where he focused on identifying therapeutic targets and understanding drug actions at the cellular level. He seeks to merge technical expertise with innovative problem-solving.

Main focus: drug resistance in melanoma, drug combinations, mTOR signaling