Azeem Haider Syed, MD

Fyza Shaikh is an Assistant Professor in Cancer Immunology in the Department of Oncology in the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center. She joined the faculty after completing her fellowship in medical oncology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (JHSOM) and residency in internal medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center as part of the ABIM research pathway. She received her MD and PhD in Microbiology and Immunology at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. The Shaikh lab at JHSOM is focused on how the microbiome impacts host immunological responses to tumorigenesis and anti-tumor responses to immunomodulatory agents. The lab uses a combination of translational approaches using samples collected from human cohort studies and clinical trials as well as murine models to ask more detailed mechanistic questions and works across multiple tumor types (melanoma, lung, esophageal, head and neck, etc). The overall approach uses combination of clinical, computational, and lab-based techniques using a rich biorepository containing clinically annotated metadata with known and putative biomarkers of ICI response, such as PD-L1 and tumor mutational burden, paired with longitudinal fecal and plasma samples that correlate with clinical milestones (i.e. response/nonresponse by imaging and treatment-related toxicity). The goal is to focus on microbial functionality and build defined bacterial consortia that can then be tested in murine models to define colonization, metabolomics, and intra-tumoral immune response. This translational approach, with cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis of human samples, paired with mechanistic studies in murine models, has the potential to address both limitations in previously published studies and generate new hypotheses to make advances in this field and improve ICI responses for patients with advanced malignancies.

Dr. Lemore Carmi is an Assistant Professor in the Johns Hopkins Medicine Department of Radiology and Radiological Sciences. She specializes in interventional radiology.Dr. Carmi received her M.D. from Drexel University in 2003, and performed a residency in diagnostic radiology at the Hahnemann University Hospital in 2008. She completed a fellowship in interventional radiology at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in 2009, and then joined the Johns Hopkins faculty.

Mira M. Sachdeva, M.D., Ph.D. specializes in the medical and surgical management of diseases of the retina, including diabetic retinopathy, macular degeneration, retinal vascular occlusions, retinal detachments, macular holes, and epiretinal membranes. Her research efforts are directed towards developing new treatments to prevent or reverse the retinal neurodegeneration and vision loss that occurs in patients with diabetes. Dr. Sachdeva’s ultimate goal is to identify strategies for neuroprotection that are broadly applicable to other conditions in which the retina is irreversibly damaged, including macular degeneration and retinal detachment.Dr. Sachdeva received her medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania medical school. She completed her residency at the Wilmer Eye Institute in 2014. Thereafter, she completed a fellowship at the Massachusetts Ear and Eye Infirmary.Dr. Sachdeva is currently a Wilmer Rising Professor in Ophthalmology.