Columbia University Center for Precision Medicine and Genomics

2024 Summer Internship

Special thank you to Dr. Ali Gharavi for spearheading this program.

CPMG strives to provide a meaningful experience that enhances knowledge, understanding and appreciation of biomedical research. To bring equity and opportunity to a diverse population of NYC students, we have partnered with the LifeSci NYC initiative (https://lifesci.nyc) to involve more students from underrepresented communities into our program. This summer, we hosted 15 CUNY students who joined the Department of Medicine through LifeSci, 6 students who worked with the O’Brien Center, and several other students who joined 4 labs in the Division of Nephrology. In addition to working on diverse research projects, students participated in several activities that were designed to promote their personal and professional growths. Of these included:


LifeSci students:

Adama Diaby (Mentors: Dr. Timothy Wang, Leah Zamechek-Slais, MS Quin Waterbury)
“Weight loss partially reverses obesity related adipose tissue function”

Aidan Vera (Mentor: Dr. Marie-Pierre St.-Onge)
“How do walnuts improve our sleep?”

Briana Pereyra (Mentor: Dr. Matthew Yousefzadeh)
“Investigating Macrophage Function in Aging and Disease”

Christine Ramiro (Mentor: Dr. Maya Sabatello)
“Representation of Participants with Disability in the All of Us Research Project for Precision Medicine Research”

Dzevad Lalicic (Mentors: Kelsie Bogyo, MS and Natalie Vena, MS)
“Return of Genetic Research Results”

Jannae McFarlane (Mentor: Dr. Matthew Yousefzadeh)
“Creating a New Mouse Model to Study Accelerated Aging”

Jun Hong (Mentor: Dr. Joshua Motelow)
“Calculating Phenotype Risk Scores of Genetic Disease for Pediatric Patients with Critical Illness”

Kerlyn Difo (Mentor: Dr. Joshua Motelow)
“Developing a Multi-Omic Phenotypic Data Search tool to find publicly available data associated with DBGAP Publications via PubMed”

Laura Romelus (Mentors: Dr. Dympna Gallagher and Maxine Ashby-Thompson, Ed.D)
“POWERS Research Study: Does Physical Activity Correlate with Weight Loss?”

Natasha Sternberg (Mentors: Dr. Heedeok Han and Dr. Hila Milo Rasouly)
“Identifying Barriers to Kidney Genetics Testing”

Nida Tai (Mentor: Dr. Heedeok Han)
“Reducing Disparities in Medical Therapy Prescription for Ethnic Minorities with Chronic Kidney Disease”

Ryan Nunez (Mentor: Sarath Babu Krishna Murthy, MS)
“Auditing and creating a dashboard for sequenced nephrology samples”

Sebastian Escobar (Mentors: Dr. Nathalie Moise and Jennifer Mizhquiri-Barbecho, MS)
“An implementation science informed, patient activation intervention for depression treatment in coronary heart disease patients: Impact on clinician referral and prescribing behavior”

Wilmer Chang (Mentor: Dr. Maya Sabatello)
"Analyzing Disparities in social determinants of health for people with disability and the subgroups in the “All of Us Research Program" (AoURP), and the representativeness of the population compared"

Xavier Stewart (Mentor: Dr. Xueling Wu)
“Utilization of Liposomes and Exosomes for IgG and IgA Expression”

O'Brien Center Students

Erika Maria Gonzalez (Mentor: Dr. Anne-Catrin Uhlemann)
“Investigating Two-Component System Signaling in UTI Pathogen Klebsiella pneumoniae”

Mahirah Islam Khan (Mentor: Dr. Andrew Beenken)
“Partial Purification of Apolipoprotein E3 (ApoE3) from Mouse Kidney Supernatant”

Ofek Harnof (Mentors: Dr. Hila Milo Rasouly and Sarath Babu Krishna Murthy, MS)
“Identification of Variable Number Tandem Repeats in the MUC1 Gene Associated with Chronic Kidney Disease Using Exome Sequencing”