Harvard Biotech Club Leadership
Executive Team
Michelle Boisvert
Co-President
Michelle is a graduate student in Harvard’s Biological and Biomedical Sciences PhD Program. She received her BA in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2019. Michelle is co-advised by Pratiti Bandopadhayay and Rameen Beorukhim, where she is using computational efforts to better characterize pediatric brain tumors.
Binita Shah
Co-President
Binita is a PhD candidate in Harvard’s Biological and Biomedical Sciences program. She received her BA from Barnard College, Columbia University in Cellular and Molecular Biology in 2019. Prior to graduate school, Binita worked at Schrödinger, Inc. in NYC. Currently, she is characterizing deubiquitinating enzymes (DUBs) using structural biology in the laboratories of Eric Fischer and Sara Buhrlage.
Fang Xie
Vice President
Fang is a postdoc at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School. He is co-mentored by Drs. Steven Balk and Rupal Bhatt in the Division of Hematology and Oncology at BIDMC, where his research focuses on molecular mechanisms underlying therapeutic resistance in patients with advanced prostate cancer. He is also conducting a drug screen on 3D tumor organoids to identify adjuvants for current therapies in prostate cancer.
Senmiao Sun
Vice President
Director of Amgen Biotech Course
Co-Director of Career Fair
Senmiao is a Ph.D. candidate in the Neuroscience Program at Harvard Medical School. He combines several cutting-edge techniques, including genetically engineered mouse models, recombinant viral vectors, CRISPR/Cas9 mediated knockout system, optogenetics, in vivo calcium recording, and high throughput single-cell RNA sequencing to study mouse torpor behavior in the laboratory of Dr. Michael Greenberg. He is interested in pursuing a future career that lies at the interface of science and business.
Email: sun_senmiao@g.harvard.edu ; LinkedIn
Cyrianne Keutcha
Vice President
Director of Diversity & Inclusion
Co-Director of Info Sessions
Cyrianne is a Ph.D. student in the Biological Sciences in Public Health Program and Therapeutics Graduate Program at Harvard. Her thesis work in Dr. Manoj Duraisingh’s lab focuses on the interactions of the pathogen Plasmodium falciparum and red blood cells.
Directors of Lecture-based Learning
Johnathan Kepple
Co-Director of Patent Law Course
Johnathan is a PhD Candidate in the Biological Sciences in Public Health program. His thesis work in the lab of Thomas Bernhardt focuses on the maintenance of outer membrane homeostasis in the gram-negative bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa.
Kelsey Roberts Kingman
Co-Director of Patent Law Course
Kelsey is a member of the class of 2025 at Harvard Law School and a patent agent at Morrison & Foerster. Before joining Morrison & Foerster, she completed her Ph.D. at Stanford, where she studied the molecular basis for Hedgehog signal transduction.
Hanna Doh
Co-Director of Biotech Public Equity Investment Course
Hanna is a PhD candidate in the Harvard Biological and Biomedical Sciences program. Her thesis work in the lab of Dr. Taru Muranen focuses on molecular mechanisms underlying chemotherapy resistance in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma.
Claire Johnson
Co-Director of Biotech Public Equity Investment Course
Claire is a PhD student in the Bioinformatics and Genomics Program. She works on building machine learning models for multi-modal patient data to enable the future of precision oncology and novel cancer biology discovery, advised by Dr. Eliezer Van Allen at Dana-Farber and the Broad institute.
Kanae Sasaki
Director of 101 Series
Kanae is a PhD student in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences program and the Therapeutics Graduate Program at Harvard University. Her research in the laboratory of Dr. Connie Cepko focuses on creating novel gene therapies to prevent cone photoreceptor cell death in retinitis pigmentosa.
Daniel Jaewon Lee
Co-Director of Biotech Public Equity Investment Course
Daniel is a PhD student in the Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics program at Harvard Medical School. In Dr. Shamil Sunyaev’s lab, his work focuses on identifying pathogenic variants in the human germline by using evolutionary theories and machine learning approaches on population sequencing datasets.
Rhea Sahu
Co-Director of International Initiative
Rhea is a PhD candidate in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences program and Therapeutics Graduate program at Harvard. Her work focuses on co-targeting oncogenic and epigenetic pathways in castration-resistant prostate cancer in Dr. Karen Cichowski’s laboratory.
Directors of Hands-On Training
Rebecca Gorelov
Co-Director of Engage
Rebecca is a PhD candidate in Harvard’s Biological and Biomedical Sciences Program. She is currently conducting her thesis research in Konrad Hochedlinger’s lab, where she is studying stem cell biology and epigenetics.
Erin Sharoni
Director of Ideation
Erin is a Master of Bioethics student at Harvard Medical School, working on the application of AI technology to epigenetics and longevity. She has over a decade of work experience in biotech, digital health, and finance. Erin has co-founded two startup companies and serves on the Advisory Board of the global nonprofit Animal Save Movement. LinkedIn
Allison Flores
Co-Director of Engage
Allison is a PhD candidate in Harvard's Chemical Biology Program and the Therapeutics Graduate Program. Within the lab of Dr. George Church at the Wyss Institute, her work focuses on protein engineering technology development with genetically encoded non-standard amino acids.
Luke Meraz Murphy
Co-Director of Harvard Biotech Incubator, Info Sessions, and Engage
Luke is a PhD candidate in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences program at Harvard. In the lab of Dr. Alexander Soukas at Massachusetts General Hospital, his work focuses on uncovering novel genetic mechanisms of longevity in Caenorhabditis elegans.
Benedetto DiCiaccio
Co-Director of Harvard Biotech Incubator
Benedetto is a PhD candidate in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences program at Harvard. In Dr. Kornelia Polyak's lab at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, his work focuses on epigenetic alterations and abnormal transcriptional regulation in breast cancer.
Muhammad Ahmad
Director of Explore
Ahmad is a Ph.D. candidate in Biology and Biomedical Sciences Program. His research in Dr. Norbert Perrimon's lab focuses on developing CRISPR-Cas9 based screening to identify new signaling components for GPCR signaling that may serve as therapeutic targets to treat obesity and obesity-related diseases
Nicolas Gort Freitas
Co-Director of Crossover
Nico is a PhD candidate in the Systems, Synthetic and Quantitative Biology program. His thesis work at Allon Klein's lab involves studying variability in human hematopoiesis and the role of innate immunity in immunotherapy. In his free time, Nico plays bass in the GSAS jazz band. He also enjoys dancing, doing anything outdoors, and playing soccer.
Bingchen Li
Co-Director of Harvard Biotech Incubator and Connect
Bingchen is a postdoctoral fellow at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. His research is about LNP delivery and cancer biology, focusing on identifying therapeutic targets for rare kidney cancer patients. LinkedIn
Directors of Professional Development
Jane Rho
Director of University Networking
Jane is an MPH student at Harvard and comes from a background of management consulting, healthcare delivery, and startups. She is building a perinatal venture for first-time caregivers with automated support/education.
Monica Cassandras
Director of Industry Networking
Monica is a PhD student in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences graduate program at Harvard. Her thesis work in Dr. Judith Agudo’s lab at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute focuses on identifying mechanisms of immune evasion in breast cancer metastasis.
Ilzat Ali
Director of Site Visits
Ilzat is a PhD candidate in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences program at Harvard. In the laboratory of Dr. Jeffrey Dvorin, he utilizes cutting-edge microscopy techniques to uncover essential processes in the complex life cycle of the malaria-causing parasite Plasmodium falciparum. LinkedIn
Georgia Stirtz
Director of Connect
Georgia is a PhD candidate in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences program at Harvard. She received her BA in Neurobiology from Harvard College in 2017. Her work in Dr. Len Zon's lab focuses on live imaging the spatiotemporal dynamics of T cell infiltration in a zebrafish model of melanoma.
Yasmine Ayman
Co-Director of Career Fair
Yasmine is a Ph.D student in the Neuroscience Program at Harvard Medical School . She combines cutting-edge tools in systems neuroscience and molecular neurobiology to understand the molecular mechanisms of network stability during navigational decision making in the lab of Dr. Christopher Harvey. She is interested in using her research to inform treatments for psychiatric disorders.
Antonieta Salguero
co-Director of Info Sessions
Antonieta is a PhD candidate in the laboratory of Dr. Philip Cole at Harvard Medical School. She works on understanding the mechanisms of Akt regulation using chemical biology approaches.
Danika Rodrigues
co-Director of Info Sessions
Danika is a PhD candidate in the Bioengineering program at Harvard. Her thesis work in the lab of Dr. Samir Mitragotri focuses on using a novel approach to develop whole tumor cell vaccines.
Communications Team
Grace Liu
Director of Communications
Grace is a Master of Biomedical Informatics student at Harvard Medical School. She works in the Dr. David Liu lab at Dana Farber Cancer Institute investigating longitudinal genomic changes in cancer patients that impact therapeutic response.
Isabella Jaén Maisonet
Communications Team
Isabella is a PhD candidate in Harvard's Chemical Biology Program and the Therapeutics Graduate Program. Her research in the Buhrlage Lab focuses on the development of small molecule probes for deubiquitinating enzymes, with a specific interest in the role this family of enzymes plays in oncology. LinkedIn
Yossef Baidi
Communications Team
Yossef is a PhD student in the Chemical Biology program at Harvard. His research in Rameen Beroukhim's lab focuses on tumor evolution in glioblastoma in response to drug treatment.
Katlyn Gabriel
Communications Team
Katlyn is a graduate student in the Biological Sciences and Public Health Program and the Therapeutics Graduate Program. Her research in the Greka Lab aims to streamline therapeutic discovery for rare disease variants utilizing genetic perturbation libraries and high-throughput imaging analysis. Currently, her research is focused in discovering novel regulators of peroxisomal biology or related disorders.
Email: kgabriel@broadinstitute.org
General Leadership
Our team is growing and we’re always looking for talented and passionate new members to help lead HBC into the future.
Interested in joining our leadership team? Please apply here.