People

Nikoleta Pavlaki, PhD

Nikoleta is a pharmacist with a long-standing interest in cardiovascular pharmacology, particularly for the molecular mechanisms underlying arrhythmias​ and heart failure at the early onset of the disease. She obtained her PhD by exploring the potential of gene therapy in a heart failure model at University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, and she now works as a postdoctoral research fellow at Boston Children’s Hospital.

Sofia de la Serna Buzon, PhD

Sofia completed her PhD at the University of North Carolina in the Ecology and Evolution of Organismal Biology department. Her thesis focused on the long-term consequences of phenotypic plasticity. As a postdoc at Boston Children’s, she is working on optimizing a gene therapy to treat CPVT (catecholaminergic polymorphic ventricular tachycardia). Additionally, she is interested in studying the role of the RYR2 receptor in the hippocampus. 

Daisuke Yoshinaga, MD, PhD

Daisuke received his MD from Kyoto University in 2008 and, following clinical fellowship, his PhD from Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine in 2020. His doctoral theme addressed the establishment of phenotypic analysis for long QT syndrome using iPSC model. Now, he researches the effect of protein modification on the cardiac electrophysiology and morphology and gene therapy for the cardiac diseases.

Yashasvi Tharani, BA

Yashasvi is a recent graduate from Boston University where she completed a BA and Honors i with specialization in cell, molecular and genetics. She will be working on cell reprogramming to to develop patient derived iPS cells. She will also be working on developing patient derived cardiomyocyte models using bioreactors for CPVT.

Joseph Milosh

Joseph is a junior at Boston College studying economics and biology. He is working to develop and optimize cell patterning methods and test RYR2 activity using a synthetic bilayer system.

Kristina Chambers, MD

Kristina is currently a resident physician in the Boston Combined Residency Program at Boston Children’s Hospital/Boston Medical Center. Under the Sarnoff Fellowship from 2018-2019, she worked in the lab studying CPVT.

Danielle Heims-Waldron, BS

Danielle has a degree in biological sciences from Wellesley College. In 2017, Danielle joined the Bezzerides Lab after a number of years in the Pu Lab. Here, she focused on developing gene therapies for CPVT, modeling cardiac arrhythmias using iPSC-CMs, and developing novel approaches to protein quantification. Danielle matriculated to the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 2020, where she plans to pursue her interests in cardiology and pediatric health equity.

Jasmine Feng, BA

Jasmine graduated from the University of Richmond studying Public Health and Biology. She is interested in better understanding atrial fibrillation and its current and long term impact. As an RA at the BRG, she worked on developing models to depict and accurately understand the mechanisms to atrial fibrillation and develop therapeutic solutions through gene therapy. Jasmine is now studying medicine at the Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine in New York City.

Thomas Samenuk, BS

Thomas is a graduate of Boston College where he majored in biology and minored in medical humanities. As an RA in the BRG, he worked to optimize gene therapy specificity for CPVT and characterize pre-existing immunity against AAV in potential therapy candidates. He also developed patient derived iPSC models for CPVT. Thomas currently works at Clarion Healthcare.

Roza Ogurlu, BS

Roza has a degree in biomedical engineering from Tufts University. She is working as a research associate at a biotech startup in Cambridge with the mission of improving AAV capsids using artificial intelligence.

Sanam Shafaat Talab, PhD

Sanam did her PhD in Biomedical Physiology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, where she used hiPSC-CMs to discover a new genetic mutation resulting in sudden infant death syndrome. As a Postdoc in the BRG lab, she was interested in understanding the underlying mechanism of catecholaminergic polymorphic ventricular tachycardia (CPVT) mutations and association with atrial arrhythmias.

David Walker, BS

David is a graduate of the University of New Hampshire where he majored in biomedical science. As an RA in the BRG, he was interested in using patient derived cardiomyocytes in testing both drug and gene therapies that could reverse the CPVT phenotype. David currently attends the Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine.