Keywords: Immunology, Human research, Translational research, Cancer, In vivo models, Xenotransplant, Flow cytometry, RNA-seq, ATAC-seq, myeloid cells, hematopoiesis, transcription factors, inflammation

Amy Fan

Immunology PhD Candidate, Stanford University

Amy Fan is a fifth year Immunology PhD Candidate in Dr. Ravindra Majeti’s lab at the Stanford Cancer Institute and Institute of Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine. For her thesis work, Amy is studying the role of the transcription factor RUNX1 in myeloid development and inflammation to understand the disease pathogenesis in individuals with germline RUNX1 mutations, who are at risk for the development of myeloid leukemias and some autoimmune conditions such as eczema.

Prior to being in the San Francisco Bay Area, Amy attended school and worked in Cambridge, MA. She received her B.S. in biology with a minor in Asian diaspora studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she studied the role of fatty acid metabolism and immune evasion in metastasizing cancer cells with Dr. Robert Weinberg at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. After graduating in 2015, she worked at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard with Dr. Deborah Hung to develop single cell RNA-seq technologies to simultaneously probe host and pathogen transcripts and to study Salmonella-macrophage interactions. In her current work with Dr. Ravindra Majeti at Stanford University, Amy is studying the role of RUNX1 in normal hematopoietic development to inform our understanding of the molecular and cellular pathogenesis of germline RUNX1 disorders.

In and out of the lab, Amy works toward being an educator and advocate. She has mentored students in the lab as well as in multiple outreach programs and taught and/or organized several courses at both MIT and Stanford. During her time at Stanford, she has represented students as president of the Biomedical Association for the Interest of Minority Students and as student representative on several committees at the School of Medicine, where most of her work has focused on making graduate admissions more equitable. As of November 2020, she is serving as a student member of Stanford’s Biosciences Diversity Advisory Council and Stanford Immunology’s Community, Diversity, and Inclusion in Immunology Committee.

You can learn more about Amy on her website.