Experience

eCLOSE Institute

• United States
• Primary and Secondary Education
• 1 - 100 Employee

• Executive Director and Chief Scientific Officer

  • Apr 2019 - Present

  Greater Philadelphia Area Diet is the key to health. eCLOSE Institute celebrates your questions, ideas, and cultural experiences and provides laboratory research training to thousands of high school students and their teachers. Our goal is to transform the way students learn Biological Sciences and define how diet affects disease in order to develop personalized diets that will improve health.



Fox Chase Cancer Center

• United States
• Hospitals and Health Care
• 700 & Above Employee

• Associate Professor

  • Aug 2014 - Present

  Philadelphia, PA Decades of research have demonstrated that a balanced diet is elemental for human health. Malnutrition affects all socioeconomic levels and cultures, with particular impact on individuals in low resource settings. However, our understanding of how individual nutrients effect the cellular changes associated with aberrant states is at its infancy. The underlying hypothesis for our work is that each component of a balanced diet influences signal transduction pathways in target cells, resulting in… Show more Decades of research have demonstrated that a balanced diet is elemental for human health. Malnutrition affects all socioeconomic levels and cultures, with particular impact on individuals in low resource settings. However, our understanding of how individual nutrients effect the cellular changes associated with aberrant states is at its infancy. The underlying hypothesis for our work is that each component of a balanced diet influences signal transduction pathways in target cells, resulting in a collective developmental response within tissues. Our goal is to map the signal transduction pathways targeted by individual nutrients in vivo, in order to build a comprehensive mechanistic understanding of how dietary imbalance affects normal development and identify inexpensive, widely accessible interventions to reduce and treat cancer and other diseases.

• Director

  • Sep 2012 - Present

  Philadelphia, PA We created Immersion Science in 2013 to meet two primary goals: 1) to bring authentic research experiences to high school students and support them in their pursuit of research careers 2) to develop a novel citizen science model for laboratory research where high school students conduct primary research that is published in peer-reviewed journals. The program has grown from 150 students in 2013 to ~500 in 2018, with more students participating each week. More than 85% of… Show more We created Immersion Science in 2013 to meet two primary goals: 1) to bring authentic research experiences to high school students and support them in their pursuit of research careers 2) to develop a novel citizen science model for laboratory research where high school students conduct primary research that is published in peer-reviewed journals. The program has grown from 150 students in 2013 to ~500 in 2018, with more students participating each week. More than 85% of participants address disparities at the faculty level in biomedical science and >90% of participants continue as STEM majors in college. Three ISP graduates are pursuing Ph.D.'s in STEM fields! We published our second primary research paper describing the work of Immersion Science students in 2016, with more on the way. In 2018, seven of our teacher partners in Philadelphia, Montgomery County, and southern New Jersey will train more than 300 students in high school classrooms in Immersion Science, with many students contributing data to manuscripts currently in preparation. Welcome to the Immersion Science community!

• Assistant Professor

  • Dec 2007 - Aug 2014



Stanford University

• United States
• Higher Education
• 700 & Above Employee

• Postdoctoral Fellow

  • 1999 - 2007

  Simon lab Laboratory of Michael A. Simon, PhD