Current Lab Members

Principal Investigator

Davide Ruggero, PhD

Professor, Department of Urology and Cellular & Molecular Pharmacology

Helen Diller Family Endowed Chair in Basic Cancer Research

Davide Ruggero, PhD joined UCSF in July 2007 from the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia where he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Genetics. Davide completed five years of post-doctoral training in molecular oncology and cancer genetics at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. His undergraduate education and early training were completed at the University of Rome in Italy where he earned a BS cum laude in Biology in 1994 and a PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology in 1998.

Davide has received noteworthy funding to support his groundbreaking cancer research. In 1994, as a graduate student, he received an Enichem Society fellowship. While initiating his post-doctoral research he was awarded an American-Italian Cancer Foundation fellowship. As a senior post-doctoral fellow Davide was one of two candidates, out of more than four hundred, to receive Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center’s Outstanding Research Fellow Award. In 2005, he received the prestigious V-Scholar Foundation’s Award for Cancer Research for his work on deregulations in protein synthesis during lymphomagenesis. The V-Scholar Foundation annually provides grant support to eighteen of the nation’s most brilliant young researchers. Most recently, Davide is a recipient of the 2019 ACS Professorship Award and the R35 Outstanding Investigator Award.

Collaborators and Postdoctoral Fellows

Hao Nguyen, MD, PhD

Associate Professor in Residence

About Hao

Hao is an Associate Professor of Urologic Oncology at UCSF. He received his MD-PhD degrees from Boston University School of Medicine and recently completed residency training in general surgery and urologic surgery at UC Davis. His primary focus is treatment of urologic malignancies. He was previously a surgical urologic oncology fellow in the department of urology at UCSF under the mentorship of Dr. Peter Carroll. He joined the Ruggero lab as a postdoctoral fellow to study the role of oncogenic stress induced by Myc oncogene overexpression and loss of tumor suppressor gene, PTEN, in urologic malignancies, with the primary aim of finding new molecular therapeutic targets to treat advance prostate, kidney and bladder cancer.

Contact Hao: [email protected]

Duygu Kuzuoglu-Öztürk, PhD

Adjunct Assistant Professor

About Duygu

Duygu completed her doctoral studies at Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany on the mechanism of miRNA-mediated gene silencing, just before joining the Ruggero Lab in December of 2015. Duygu’s research is focused on understanding the translatome of cancer. She is mainly interested in revealing the interacting partners of the major cap-binding protein eIF4E and the role of these uncharacterized interactions in cancer. Duygu is also a faculty member at the Sabanci University in Turkey.

Contact Duygu: [email protected]

Haojun Yang, PhD

Postdoctoral Fellow

About Haojun

Joanna Kovalski, PhD

Postdoctoral Fellow

About Joanna

Joanna joined the Ruggero lab as a postdoctoral scholar in February 2019. She received her Ph.D. in Cancer Biology from Stanford University, studying the oncogenic Ras proximal proteome. Joanna is using genome-wide CRISPRi screening coupled to single-cell level translational readout to identify novel molecular mechanisms of translational dysregulation in tumorigenesis. In particular, she is dissecting how RNA sequence and structural elements mediate selective rewiring of the cancer proteome.

Contact Joanna: [email protected]

Yangpeiwei Huang, PhD

Postdoctoral Fellow

About Peiwei

Peiwei received her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 2019. She joined the Ruggero lab as a postdoctoral fellow in 2020. Peiwei is interested in the role of the tumor microenvironment (TME) in tumor initiation and progression. To date, most studies have only examined the role of transcription in the tumor microenvironment. However, transcriptomes only partially correlate with their corresponding proteome, whereas post-transcriptional regulation is emerging as a key determinant in sculpting the cellular proteome. Peiwei’s project will focus on the missing link in the program that sustains TME and translational control in non-tumor cells.

Contact Peiwei: [email protected]

Andrew Levine, MD, PhD

Postdoctoral Fellow

About Andrew

Nimmy Mohan, PhD

Postdoctoral Fellow

About Nimmy

Nimmy joined the Ruggero lab in August 2021. She received her Ph.D. in December 2019 from Rajiv Gandhi Center for Biotechnology, India studying the non-canonical Poly(A) polymerase, Star-PAP specificity mechanism, and its role in the regulation of various cellular functions. Nimmy's research focuses on the mechanism that guides the mRNA translation specificity in cancer. She is also interested in understanding the regulatory circuits governing the translation of the cancer genome.

Contact: [email protected]

Adrianna Dabrowska, PhD

Postdoctoral Fellow

About Adrianna

Adrianna joined the Ruggero Lab in January 2022 as a Postdoctoral Fellow. She received her PhD in December 2021 at the Cancer Research UK Beatson Institute where she used a range of biochemical and biophysical techniques to distinguish the molecular roles of the highly identical paralogues of eIF4A. As a postdoc, Adrianna aims to understand ribosomal RNA modifications and their dysregulation in cancer as well as cancer-related functions of RNA binding proteins.

Contact: [email protected]

Ashish Noronha, PhD

Postdoctoral Fellow

About Ashish

Ashish joined the Ruggero lab as a postdoctoral fellow in April 2022. He received his PhD at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel where he deciphered the role of AXL and error-prone DNA replication to confer drug resistance and also offered strategies to treat EGFR-mutant lung cancer. Here his study focuses on understanding the drug resistance mechanisms involved in breast cancer and also the role of translation fidelity that regulates cancer progression.

Contact: [email protected]

Ekin Guney, MD

Postdoctoral Fellow

About Ekin

Ekin joined the Ruggero and Weiss Labs in July 2023 as a Postdoctoral Fellow. He received his medical doctor degree in Istanbul Faculty of Medicine (Capa). He completed his anatomic pathology residency and is currently a 2nd-year neuropathology clinical fellow at UCSF. He completed his first postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he studied endoplasmic reticulum and mitochondria biology, calcium homeostasis, protein homeostasis and signaling pathways in metabolic organs in the setting of obesity. In collaboration with Weiss lab, Ekin aims to study translational control in brain tumors in response to neuronal activity and signaling from tumor microenvironment.

Contact Ekin: [email protected]

Graduate Students

Kenya Bonitto

PhD Student

About Kenya

Kenya joined the Ruggero lab as a PhD student in the Tetrad Program in April 2022. She attended UCLA for her undergraduate career where she explored the role of histone modifications in establishing and maintaining the cell state of quiescence. As a graduate student, Kenya is interested in characterizing the functions of non-canonical translation factors, as well as understanding how cancer cells control translational machinery.

Contact Kenya: [email protected]

Macey Slota

PhD Student

About Macey

Macey joined the Ruggero lab as a PhD student in the Tetrad Program in June 2023. She completed her undergraduate studies at Belmont University. Following graduation, she was a Research Assistant at Vanderbilt University, where she investigated the role of WDR5 inhibitors in colon cancer. As a graduate student, Macey is interested in understanding ribosomal RNA modifications and their involvement in cancer.

Contact Macey: [email protected]

Kevin Boardman

PhD Student

About Kevin

Kevin joined the Ruggero lab as a PhD student in the Tetrad Program in June 2024. He received his B.S. in Genetics and Genomics from UC Davis. After graduating, he worked as a research specialist at UC Berkeley (Doug Koshland’s lab) where he investigated the regulatory mechanisms involved in the modulation of cohesin activity and their effects on higher-order chromatin structure. As a graduate student, Kevin is interested in understanding how RNA-binding proteins are regulated and how their dysregulation can lead to disease.

Contact Kevin: [email protected]

Research Associates

Lingru Xue, M.S.

Associate Specialist

About Lin

Lingru joined Dr. Ruggero’s lab as an Associate Specialist in March 2016. She received her BSc in Biology from Lanzhou University, China and MSc in Biochemistry from McGill University, Canada. She studies the unfolded protein response (UPR) pathway using PDX mouse models of prostate cancer that recapitulate human prostate cancer and the molecular mechanisms underlying the signaling pathway regulation and tumor initiation, progression and metastasis of CRPC.

Contact Lin: [email protected]

Emma Figueredo

Junior Specialist

About Emma

Kaylee Yiakis

Junior Specialist

About Kaylee

Chethaka Senarathne

Junior Specialist

About Chet

Isabelle Liu

Junior Specialist

About Isabelle

Isabelle joined the Ruggero lab (joint with the Goodarzi lab) as a bioinformatics specialist in July 2024. She completed her undergraduate education at UCLA, where she received a B.S. in Bioengineering with a minor in Bioinformatics. She is interested in leveraging computational tools to better understand cancer development. In her free time, she enjoys spending time outdoors and trying new restaurants with friends.

Contact Isabelle: [email protected]

Chi Phan

Junior Specialist

About Chi

Chi joined the Ruggero lab in July 2024 as a Junior Specialist. She attended UC Davis for her undergraduate education where she received a B.S. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology with a minor in Psychology. Her research interests are broadly related to studying the molecular mechanisms of cancer development. In her free time, Chi enjoys baking, crocheting, and going to cafes.

Contact Chi: [email protected]

Ruggero Lab

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Principal Investigator

Davide Ruggero, PhD

Collaborators and Postdoctoral Fellows

Hao Nguyen, MD, PhD

Duygu Kuzuoglu-Öztürk, PhD

Haojun Yang, PhD

Joanna Kovalski, PhD

Yangpeiwei Huang, PhD

Andrew Levine, MD, PhD

Nimmy Mohan, PhD

Adrianna Dabrowska, PhD

Ashish Noronha, PhD

Ekin Guney, MD

Graduate Students

Kenya Bonitto

Macey Slota

Kevin Boardman

Research Associates

Lingru Xue, M.S.

Emma Figueredo

Kaylee Yiakis

Chethaka Senarathne

Isabelle Liu

Chi Phan