Romane Cathelin
Romane Cathelin is a Bioinformatics Programmer at the Applied Bioinformatics Labs and Precision Medicine program at NYU Langone. She earned her MSc in Bioinformatics from the University of Bordeaux, France. Her research centers on the role of chromatin organization in cancer, with a particular focus on leveraging machine learning techniques to enhance our understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of the disease.
As a 2024 recipient of the MSF Fellowship, Romane will concentrate on identifying clonal-specific chromatin organization in tumors using deep learning approaches. Her goal is to pinpoint and target aggressive or treatment-resistant clones. She will be mentored by Dr. Aris Tsirigos and Dr. Gareth Morgan throughout this work.
Romane Cathelin, MSc
Michael Durante
Michael is a Hematology/Oncology Fellow at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, part of UHealth – the University of Miami Health System, and Jackson Memorial Hospital as part of the Physician Scientist Training Program. He completed his MD/PhD training at the University of Miami’s Medical Scientist Training Program in cancer biology with over 20 peer-reviewed publications. He has been a part of Drs. Landgren and Maura’s computational myeloma laboratory since 2022 and is a co-author in numerous publications including journals such as Nature Medicine and Journal of Clinical Oncology. Michael seeks to apply his extensive computational expertise to develop and utilize cutting-edge computational models to predict disease progression, treatment responses, and outcomes for individuals with high-risk multiple myeloma. Michael has a special interest in identifying mechanisms of resistance in multiple myeloma patients undergoing modern targeted and cellular immunotherapies. Michael’s fellowship mentors are C. Ola Landgren, MD, PhD and Francesco Maura, MD.
Michael Durante, MD, PhD
Minghao Dang
Minghao earned his Ph.D. in 2017 from the Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Following his initial postdoctoral training, Minghao joined Dr. Linghua Wang’s lab at MDACC in 2019 where he received comprehensive training in applying innovative bioinformatics approaches to dissect the tumor ‘ecosystem’; deeply profiling tumor cells, cells of the tumor microenvironment (TME), and exploring tumor-immune stroma crosstalk at single-cell resolution across many cancer types. Since 2020, Minghao has focused his research in multiple myeloma (MM), contributing to several projects such as the single-cell profiling of BCMA naïve vs. refractory relapsed MM patients (ASH 2022), integrative genomic and transcriptomic profiling of MM precursors in a prospective longitudinal observational study (AACR 2023), single-cell multi-omic data analysis of TME evolution across the disease spectrum of MM (ASH 2023), and single cell multi-omic data analysis of clonotypic and transcriptional evolution of MM precursor disease (Cancer Cell 2023).
As a recipient of the MSF Fellowship in 2024, Minghao is now an Associate Data Scientist under the mentorship of Dr. Linghua Wang and Dr. Robert Orlowski. Minghao’s research as an MSF Fellow will focus the use of single cell multi-omics data analysis to dissect tumor heterogeneity, tumor evolution and dynamics of TME remodeling during the progression of multiple, with special attention to the t(4;14) subtype.
Minghao Dang, PhD
Marina Michaud
Marina is a PhD candidate in the Cancer Biology PhD program at Emory University, where she began training under Dr. Manoj Bhasin in 2023. Her research primarily centers on applying single-cell and spatial transcriptomics to map the landscape of the tumor microenvironment across diverse cancers, aiming to identify novel biomarkers and therapeutic targets. In 2024, Marina extended her studies to multiple myeloma (MM) as a member of the MMRF Immune Atlas Consortium, contributing to the elucidation of intercellular communication in the MM bone marrow immune microenvironment. She has also contributed to several other MM studies, focusing on the longitudinal profiling of immune microenvironment therapy responses, applying deep learning to distinguish between healthy and malignant plasma cells during myelomagenesis, and pioneering genome-wide spatial transcriptomic mapping of MM biopsies at single-cell resolution.
As a recipient of the MSF Computational Biology Fellowship in 2025, Marina’s work centers on investigating the role of the noncoding transcriptome of the MM bone marrow microenvironment to identify novel, noncoding elements that drive aggressive myeloma cell phenotypes and immune dysregulation with a specific focus on t(4;14) myeloma. To do so, Marina developed a novel systematic approach for integrated analyses of the coding and noncoding transcriptomes using existing sequencing data.
Marina Michaud
Denis Ohlstrom
Denis is an MD/PhD student in the joint biomedical engineering program at Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology. His training in bioinformatics began at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus (2018–2020), where he completed his master’s degree working with Dr. Dan Sherbenou. There, he studied intra-patient heterogeneity of malignant plasma cells in multiple myeloma (MM) and their contributions to monoclonal protein production and osteolytic lesion formation.
In 2023, Denis joined Dr. Manoj Bhasin’s lab, studying the dynamics of MM and the bone marrow immune microenvironment using single cell RNA sequencing of longitudinal biopsies across diagnosis, response to induction therapy, and eventual disease progression. As a recipient of the MSF Fellowship in 2025, his research focus will be on utilization of spatial multi-omics to characterize interactions between t(4;14) MM and its immune microenvironment from diagnosis through disease progression.
Denis Ohlstrom