Lab Members

Sachet A. Shukla, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Hematopoietic Biology & Malignancy
Immunology
Director of Computational Biology, ECLIPSE 
Director, HBM Cancer Vaccine Program
 

Juan Gallegos, M.S.
Data Scientist

Juan Gallegos graduated from MD Anderson Cancer UTHealth Houston Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences with degrees in biostatistics and biomathematics. Prior to joining the Shukla Lab, Juan led the informatic efforts for the Baylor College of Medicine NIH-funded U54 Knock Out Mouse Project (KOMP). In the Shukla Lab, he focuses on developing computational pipelines for next generation and third generation sequencing, team management and implementing emerging technologies into the research workflow.

Beatriz Alvarado Hernandez, Ph.D. 
Research Scientist 

Beatriz is a biologist who graduated from University Autonomous of Chiapas, Mexico with a degree in chemistry pharmaco-biology. She received a Masters and Ph.D. in molecular biomedicine and in infectomics and molecular pathogenesis respectively at the Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute (CINVESTAV-IPN) in Mexico City. She also received a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) where she led the study about ORF57 KSHV viral protein interactions with host RNA and their biological role on KSHV infection, using different molecular biology techniques including next generation sequencing. Her work in the Shukla Lab focuses on the use of next-generation and third generation sequencing techniques for cancer neoantigen discovery. 

Dustin McCurry
M.D. Fellow

Dustin is a medical oncology fellow. He graduated from Biola University with degrees in biochemistry and philosophy before working in the lab of Dr. Peter Cohen at Mayo Clinic Arizona helping to develop an HLA-II based antigen discovery pipeline and adoptive therapy platform that is currently in clinical trial. He went on to earn his M.D. from University of Arizona College of Medicine – Phoenix before completing his residency and chief residency at the University of Pittsburgh. While at the University of Pittsburgh he worked with Dr. Yana Najjar mapping the spatial architecture of melanoma lymph node metastasis. At MD Anderson, he is co-mentored by Dr. Shukla and Dr. Bachireddy, where his research focuses on strategies to improve adoptive T-cell immunotherapies in hematologic malignancies through antigen discovery and better understanding resistance mechanisms to T-cell products. In the Shukla Lab, his work is focused on HLA-II antigen prediction and antigen discovery in lymphoid malignancies. Outside of work, Dustin enjoys spending time with his family and skiing in the Rockies. 

Arnau Peris Cuesta, M.Sc.
Data Scientist

Arnau graduated from the University of Bologna and received his international M.Sc. in bioinformatics, completing his thesis research at the CSIC (Parc Cientific, Valencia, Spain). He studied the design of co-expression networks to investigate regulatory pathways through transcriptomic profiling. After completing his M.Sc., he joined YourBiome Therapeutics (Lisbon, Portugal), where he led the construction of a machine learning predictor project for clinical response to COVID-19 based on the patient's gut microbiome. In the Shukla Lab, he is building a model for predicting the specificity of T cell receptor (TCR) - peptide-major histocompatibility complex (pMHC) interactions, while actively working on the Antigen Discovery Platform development.

Chunlei Yu, M.S.
Data Scientist

Chunlei is a data scientist with a master’s degree in bioinformatics from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing Institute of Genomics in September 2017. Chunlei previously worked at Ziopharm as a Bioinformatics Scientist, which provided her with extensive experience in analyzing sequencing data from cancer patients. As an associate computational scientist in the Hematopoietic Biology and Malignancy department, her ongoing research studies focus on antigen discovery through computational methods.

Julian Gascoyne
Ph.D. Candidate

Julian is a graduate student studying biostatistics in the MD Anderson Cancer Center UTHealth Houston Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences joint program. After graduating from the University of Edinburgh with a bachelor’s degree in theoretical physics, he worked as a computational engineer at a startup company in Edinburgh. From there, he transitioned into work as both data scientist and automation engineer in MD Anderson’s Molecular Diagnostic Laboratory where he worked to automate and deploy the MAPP Liquid Biopsy Assay. Now in the Shukla Lab, he works on bioinformatic and biostatistical tools that focus on the HLA region of the genome. In his spare time, he likes reading, bouldering, hiking and camping.

Bohu Pan, Ph.D.
Data Scientist

Bohu is a data scientist who graduated from the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. With a past role as a Staff Fellow at the National Center for Toxicological Research (NCTR), U.S. Food and Drug Administration, he excels in developing and executing analysis pipelines for next generation sequencing (NGS) data. His expertise includes assessing reproducibility of analysis results, collaborating on research projects in pharmaceuticals and biological sciences and managing large datasets on high-performance computers. In the Shukla Lab, his work is focused on the development of pipelines to identify cancer-specific neoantigens from multi-omics.

Srinath Lakshmivenkatesh
Ph.D. candidate

Srinath completed his integrated bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biological engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. For his master’s thesis, he worked with Dr. Mohit Jolly at the Indian Institute of Science to characterize the metabolic plasticity along the epithelial-mesenchymal spectrum using computational models and bioinformatics analyses. Subsequently, he worked in the lab of Dr. Robert Weinberg at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he investigated chemotherapeutic agents that induce pro-metastatic transcriptional shifts in breast cancer. In the Shukla Lab, he is currently identifying tumor-specific neoantigens in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma along with their functional immunogenicity validation. Outside of work, Srinath enjoys reading non-fiction, listening to podcasts and exploring restaurants in Houston.

Juline Deppen, Ph.D.
Research Assistant II

Juline completed her Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University in May 2023. Her thesis work within Emory University’s Division of Cardiology focused on assessing the efficacy of a vascular- and muscle-targeted cell therapy in a novel large animal model of limb ischemia. In the Shukla Lab, her research efforts are focused on validating the immune response to predicted neoantigens and optimizing cellular isolation and culture protocols. In her free time, Juline enjoys being outdoors, trying new restaurants, doing puzzles and seeing live theater.

Kuhu Rai, M.Sc.
Research Assistant II

Kuhu graduated from Dr. DY Patil University, Navi Mumbai, India, with an M.Sc. in biotechnology. Her thesis investigation focused on the biochemical and medicinal properties of the Oecophylla smaragdina species. She works with the molecular biology part of the Shukla Lab, where her primary responsibilities are sample processing and library preparation for NGS downstream processing for Pan Cancer type. She enjoys doing traditional artwork outside of work and believes cooking is therapeutic.

Nakul Shah, M.D., M.A.
M.D. Fellow

Nakul is an oncology fellow at MD Anderson Cancer Center. He previously completed medical school and internal medicine training at Washington University in St. Louis. There, under the direction of Dr. Ting Wang, he pursued research on the role of transposable elements in cancer. In the Shukla Lab, he is focused on antigen and target discovery in solid malignancies. 

Samer Mathkour
Ph.D. candidate

Samer earned his Bachelor of Science in microbiology, immunology, and molecular genetics from the University of California, Los Angeles. Driven by his passion to help cancer patients, he enrolled in a post-baccalaureate program at Johns Hopkins as a PREP Scholar, where he spearheaded a project using cell free tumor DNA as a diagnostic and monitoring tool for patients with mesothelioma. His transformative research experience on the East Coast inspired him to pursue cancer research at MD Anderson. Currently, he is a Ph.D. candidate in the Shukla Lab committed to elucidating tumor-specific antigens in acute myeloid leukemia (AML). His research aims to provide targets for immunotherapeutic modalities that can directly translate to the clinic and benefit patients.

Pappanaicken R. Kumar, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor

Kumar is a T-cell biologist and molecular immunologist who has developed CAR T-cell based therapeutic strategy to control invasive fungal infections. He received his Ph.D. degree from the Post-graduate Institute of Basic Medical Sciences, Madras, India. In the Shukla Lab, he is uniquely positioned to develop molecular biology tools for high-throughput screening to identify mRNA vaccine candidates and peptide antigen specific T cells. Besides doing cutting edge research, he is passionate about gardening and enjoys educating younger kids on go green sustainable activities.

Aya Albittar, M.D.
Ph.D. candidate

Aya is a medical doctor and an immunology masters student in the Shukla Lab. Aya obtained her M.D. from Albaath University in Syria and completed her internal medicine residency training at University of Washington in Seattle. During her residency, she worked on understanding the evolving toxicities of CAR-T therapy in hematologic malignancies. Aya was drawn to the Shukla Lab's innovative antigen discovery pipeline and promising vaccine programs. Her project is focused on neoantigen discovery in relapse/refractory multiple myeloma.