Trainees
Jurrian Van der Valk
Jurrian was a visiting graduate student supervised by Dr. Geoffrey Liu. He was studying Biomedical Sciences at Leiden University, the Netherlands. During this internship, Jurrian assessed the feasibility of analysis of hydroxymethylation patterns of cell-free DNA from blood-based liquid biopsies for implementation into the academic setting. Jurrian completed an internship at the department of Vascular Surgery at Leiden University Medical Centre. Jurrian owns a BSc in Bio-Pharmaceutical Sciences from Leiden University and after completion of this internship in July 2022, he calls himself a MSc in Biomedical Sciences.He has an MSc degree from Leiden University in Biomedical Sciences, and he is currently working as a Clinical Scientist and PhD candidate.
Danni Cheng
Danni Cheng is an otolaryngology–head and neck surgery physician and assistant researcher at West China Hospital, Sichuan University, and a postdoctoral fellow in the Biotherapy Research Laboratory. She was a visiting graduate student in Medical Biophysics at the Princess Margaret Research Institute, University of Toronto, supervised by Dr. Geoffrey Liu. Her research focuses on HPV-associated head and neck cancers, with particular interests in epidemiology, cancer genomics, tumor neoantigens, and the tumor immune microenvironment.
Rami Ajaj
Rami Ajaj was an MSc. candidate in Medical Sciences at the Institute of Medical Sciences, University of Toronto and was supervised by Dr Geoffrey Liu. Rami’s research was focused on developing data curation pipelines to improve quality and efficiency of data abstraction. He was comparing existing databases, including a natural language processing dataset, to determine the optimal method of curating lung cancer biomarkers. Rami holds a H.BSc. in Biochemistry/ Physiology from the University of Toronto.
Lidija Latifovic
Lidija Latifovic was a PhD candidate in Epidemiology at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto supervised by Dr. Geoffrey Liu. Lidija’s research investigates genetic predictors of cetuximab efficacy and toxicity in people with chemotherapy-refractory, metastatic colorectal cancer using data from the CCTG-AGITG CO.20 and CO.17 trials. She is funded by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research Frederick Banting and Charles Best Graduate Scholarships Doctoral award. Previously, Lidija worked as a Research Associate at Cancer Care Ontario investigating occupational and environmental risk factors for cancer. She holds a MSc in Epidemiology from Queen’s University and a BSc in Biology from the University of Ottawa.