Originally from Bulgaria, I obtained my undergraduate and PhD degrees from Harvard University and completed my postdoctoral training at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. As a graduate student with Dr. George Daley, I studied molecular switches that control cell identity and how they get hijacked by cancer. As a postdoc with Dr. Scott Lowe, I showed how deleting large DNA stretches helps tumors evade the immune system and spread to other organs, and that a mutation’s effect can depend on which organ the tumor has spread to. These discoveries motivated my current work and set the foundation for my independent laboratory, which was established at the University of Chicago in 2025.

My laboratory is dedicated to understanding and targeting metastatic disease—the spread of cancer from where it started to other organs—which is responsible for the great majority of cancer deaths. We are investigating what sustains metastatic tumors in different organs by teasing apart how mutations and non-mutational changes in tumor cells interact with their surrounding tissues. We aim to uncover important rules for how tumor cells adapt to different organ environments, with the ultimate goal of translating them into therapies that are tailor-made for metastatic cancers. We focus on pancreatic and stomach cancers, which exemplify the challenge of metastatic disease, and combine mouse models, genetic tools, large-scale molecular profiling, and analysis of human tumor tissues.

My past research was supported by an HHMI International Student Research Fellowship and a Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellowship. More recently, I have received the NIH Pathway to Independence Award, 40 Under 40 in Cancer Award, Forbeck Scholar Award, and Cancer Research Foundation Breakthrough Board Scholar Award.