Lab Team
Elizabeth Lawlor, MD, PhD
Dr. Elizabeth Lawlor completed her MD at McMaster University and her clinical training in pediatric hematology-oncology and bone marrow transplantation at BC Children’s Hospital in Vancouver, Canada. Her passion to discover new cures for childhood cancer led her back to school, where she completed her PhD in pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of British Columbia. She then moved to the University of California, San Francisco to finish her post-doctoral training and then began her career as an independent investigator in 2004 at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and the University of Southern California. In 2010, Lawlor moved to the University of Michigan, where her lab continued to focus its research on basic and translational studies of pediatric solid tumors, in particular Ewing sarcoma. While at Michigan, she also dedicated her energies to a second passion – graduate and post-graduate education – serving as director of the Cancer Biology PhD graduate and T32 training programs and as associate director of education and training at the Rogel Cancer Center.
Lawlor joined Seattle Children’s and the Ben Towne Center for Childhood Cancer and Blood Disorders Research in June 2020 and currently serves as associate director for the center. She is also a professor of Pediatrics at the University of Washington and adjunct professor in the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology. The overall goal of her research is to discover and define differences between normal developmental and sarcoma biology that will enable discovery of targeted therapeutics that are less toxic to growing children.
Lawlor’s lab has been continuously funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health/National Cancer Institute, American Association for Cancer Research/Stand Up to Cancer, Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation, St. Baldrick’s Foundation, the V Foundation, as well as numerous smaller funding agencies. As a dual-trained MD and PhD physician-scientist, she is committed to educating the next generation of cancer researchers and to creating a diverse pipeline of physicians and scientists who will lead us to a better tomorrow for children who are diagnosed with cancer.
-
Katherine Braun, PhD
Research Scientist
Katherine Braun received her BS in biochemistry from the University of California, Davis, and her PhD in biochemistry from the University of Iowa. Her work as a graduate student and a postdoctoral fellow at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory focused on understanding the mechanism of DNA replication in eukaryotes. In subsequent postdoctoral work at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, she studied cell cycle regulation in yeast. As a research scientist at the University of Washington, she studied the regulation of gene expression in response to changing nutrient conditions in yeast. She moved to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center to study chemoresistance in breast cancer using patient-derived organoids as a senior research scientist. She joined Seattle Children’s Research Institute in 2020 as a senior research scientist and her research focuses on understanding the role of Menin in modulating cell state and metastasis in Ewing sarcoma.
-
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Shireen received her MD from the University of Toledo College of Medicine in 2016. She completed her pediatric residency at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh in 2019, and her pediatric hematology/oncology fellowship at the University of Washington in 2022. She is currently completing her postdoctoral research fellowship. Her particular research focus is on preclinical testing and elucidating resistance mechanisms of the bromodomain inhibitor, BMS-986158, in Ewing sarcoma. She is additionally interrogating how anthracyclines, a class of drugs used widely in Ewing sarcoma and many pediatric cancers, disrupt key epigenetic and transcriptional networks. While not in the lab, she is an attending physician in the Cancer and Blood Disorders Center at Seattle Children’s Hospital and treats pediatric, adolescent and young adult patients with solid tumors.
-
Nicolas Garcia, MS
Research Scientist
Nicolas was born and raised in France, received his degrees from the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, and worked at the ENS Lyon before moving to the United States in 2010. He conducted research on Flavivirus at the Center for Vaccine Research of Pittsburgh and then moved to the West Coast at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center to work on T-cell therapy for solid and liquid tumors before joining Seattle Children’s.
-
Jacob Harris, MS
Research Technician
Jacob Harris received his BS in biology from the University of Arkansas in 2017 and his MS in biomedical engineering from New York University in 2019. He has been a part of research teams examining immune-oncology treatments at the Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and cell state heterogeneity in neuroblastoma at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. He now works in the Lawlor Lab on projects focused on TGF-Beta and Menin in Ewing sarcoma cell state, transcriptional signature and therapy resistance.
-
Aakanksha Jha, PhD
Invent Fellow, Seattle Children’s Research Institute
Aakanksha got her BE from Gujarat Technological University, her MS from the University of Florida and her PhD from the University of Florida. She engineers pre-clinical hydrogel models for Ewing sarcoma. Specifically, she is modeling the TME for the hydrogels to serve as a drug screening platform and for identifying other biological markers.
-
Jonah Valenti
Research Scientist
Jonah earned his BS in general biology and oceanography from the University of Washington in 2024. His work is on processing data generated by experiments within the lab, aiming to establish pipelines to facilitate analysis for future studies.
-
Stephanie Walter
Research Technician
Stephanie earned her BS in cell and molecular biology from Seattle University in 2023. She works on projects focused on understanding Menin’s role in metastasis in Ewing sarcoma, and the transcriptional and epigenetic effects of anthracyclines on Ewing sarcoma cells.
-
Emma Wrenn, PhD
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Emma earned her BS from UC Santa Barbara and her PhD from the Molecular and Cellular Biology Graduate Program at UW/Fred Hutchinson in 2021. Her work focuses on how specific subgroups of Ewing sarcoma cells remodel the extracellular matrix, promoting disease progression and treatment resistance.