Lab Members

Frederick Lang, M.D., is the chair and director of clinical research of Neurosurgery at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. He joined the faculty in 1996 after completing the Neurosurgical Oncology Fellowship with the department. He is an NIH-funded, translational researcher who has published extensively on gene, viral, and cellular therapies for brain tumors, and is principal investigator on multiple clinical trials that investigate these new approaches. He is a past president of the Society of Neuro-Oncology and past chair of the AANS/CNS Section on Tumors. He has published more than 150 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and has served on the editorial board of several prominent journals. Currently, he serves as the PI for MD Anderson’s Brain Cancer SPORE grant, one of only five such federally funded grants in the country.

Joy Gumin
Laboratory Coordinator

Joy received her bachelor’s degree in biology from University of Houston. Before joining the Lang Lab in 2001, Joy worked as a senior research assistant in Experimental Radiation Oncology for three years. Her current research study is looking into the sensitivity of glioma stem cells to the replication competent adenovirus Delta-24-RGD. She is also working on the characterization of patient-derived bone-marrow human mesenchymal stem cells as virus carriers for the treatment of glioblastoma.

Anwar Hossain, Ph.D.
Senior Research Scientist

Anwar completed his bachelor's and master’s degrees in biochemistry at the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh. He completed his Ph.D. in molecular biology at the Tohoku University in Japan, as a recipient of the Japanese Government Scholarship. He completed his postdoctoral training at MD Anderson under the supervision of Grady Saunders, Ph.D., and joined the Lang Lab in 2008. Hossain’s primary research interest has been to understand the role of microenvironment in glioma pathogenesis. He has been involved in key research projects studying glioma microenvironment using mouse model and targeted drug delivery using MSC and exosomes to the gliomas. In 2014, he was awarded the Career Development Award from the MD Anderson Brain Cancer SPORE.

Daniel Ledbetter
Research Investigator

Daniel received his bachelor’s degree in biology from Texas A&M University and his master’s degree in biology from the University of Kentucky. His graduate research focused on discerning the roles of Bcl-2 family proteins in regulating apoptosis during development and tumorigenesis. His research in the Lang Lab contributes to identifying and characterizing the role of mesenchymal stem-like cells in glioblastoma. Prior to joining the Lang Lab, he worked as a research assistant for Claudio Tatsui, M.D., associate professor of Neurosurgery, to develop novel three-dimensional culture methods for in vitro tumor analyses.

Lihong Long
Research Investigator

Lihong earned her master’s degree from UTHealth School of Public Health. As part of the clinical research team in the Lang Lab, Lihong works on multiple clinical research projects, including specimen collection, processing, banking and database management. She is also working on developing exosome biomarkers from biofluid specimens.

Sanjay Singh, Ph.D.
Senior Research Scientist

Sanjay received his Master of Science in biotechnology from Madurai Kamaraj University in India and his Ph.D. in molecular biology and biochemistry from Southern Illinois University. He joined the Lang Lab in April 2019. Sanjay has a long-standing interest in brain tumors and is very interested in understanding molecular mechanisms that govern neural cell behavior in both "normal" and "transformed" contexts. His current research focuses on using existing pre-clinical tools along with newly developed tools to understand the genesis and pathology of brain tumors. He is involved in the development of cerebral organoid-based model systems, which are being used to elucidate mechanisms of tumor growth and impact on normal neural cells in the absence or presence of therapeutic stressors. He also provides bioinformatics support for projects in the Lang Lab and for our collaborators by analyzing next generation sequencing data. In addition, he is exploiting the potential of human induced pluripotent stem cells to develop new approaches for cellular therapy of brain tumors.

Jing Yang
Senior Research Assistant

Jing earned her bachelor’s degree from Haerbing University in China. Prior to joining the Lang Lab, she worked with stem cells for 10 years in the Institute of Molecular Medicine at The University of Texas Health Science Center (UTHealth). She came to MD Anderson in 2013 to join the Lang Lab, where she works with cell cultures of glioma stem cells.

Bojana Milutinovic, Ph.D.
Research Scientist

Bojana received her Ph.D. in biological sciences from the University of Belgrade, in Belgrade, Serbia. She finished her postdoctoral training at Texas A&M University and MD Anderson Cancer Center, where she studied the restorative effects of MSC-derived exosomes on cognitive impairment in mouse models of traumatic brain injury and chemobrain. She joined the Lang Lab in 2023. She is interested in understanding how gliomas shape cognitive function in mouse models, as well as understanding how stress-related neuronal activity influences glioma biology.

Mohammad Fayyad Zaman
Graduate Research Assistant

Fayyad is a graduate student at the MD Anderson Cancer Center UTHealth Houston Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. His Ph.D. thesis research focuses on identifying the role of glioma-associated mesenchymal stem cells in microvascular proliferation, immunosuppression and glioblastoma progression using mouse and Syrian hamster models.