Brian Ladle, MD

Dr. Christine Pratilas is a pediatric medical oncologist at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center and Associate Professor of Oncology, Pediatrics & Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She joined the Hopkins pediatric sarcoma team in 2014. Dr. Pratilas received her undergraduate degree in Biology from Drew University in New Jersey and her medical degree from UMDNJ - Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (now Rutgers University), where she also completed her internship and residency from 1999 to 2002. From 2002 to 2005 she was a fellow in hematology and oncology in the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) Department of Pediatrics, and in the Department of Pediatric Hematology and Oncology at New York Weill Cornell Medical Center. She was a postdoctoral research fellow in Dr. Neal Rosen’s Molecular Oncogenesis Laboratory at MSKCC. From 2006 to 2014 she was attending in Pediatric Oncology at MSKCC, specializing in developmental therapeutics & sarcoma. She has been the director of the pediatric sarcoma program at Hopkins since 2018. Dr. Pratilas focuses her research on cancer-associated pathways and signal transduction, which involves figuring out how a cell’s internal molecular pathways work, and how those pathways can be molecularly controlled. This knowledge is the basis for developing promising new molecularly targeted cancer therapies, which is the focus of Dr. Pratilas’s research. Among her important scientific contributions is advancing our understanding of how certain proteins that can be mutated in cancer, known as RAF kinases (specifically BRAF), affect a cancer cell’s behavior. The research in Dr. Pratilas' laboratory is focused on RAS signal transduction pathways, concentrating on pediatric sarcomas such as rhabdomyosarcoma and malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumors, in order to develop novel therapeutics for children with these tumors.

Dr Halperin received the B.S degree in physics with highest distinction from Purdue University, the M.A. degree in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, and the M.D. degree from Louisiana State University, New Orleans, Louisiana. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, an Established Investigator and Fellow of the American Heart Association, and a McClure Fellow of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics laboratory. Dr. Halperin is currently a Professor of Medicine, Radiology and Biomedical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. He is the co-director of the Cardiovascular Imaging Center of Excellence. He serves on the editorial board of the journal Resuscitation, and is a past chair of the national American Heart Association Advanced Cardiovascular Life Support Subcommittee and a past member of the Emergency Cardiac Care Committee. Ten of his students have received young investigator awards from the American Heart Association and Heart Rhythm Society, and he has ongoing support from the National Institutes of Heath for his research programs. He has over 120 peer-reviewed publications and over 20 patents issued.