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.

Postdoctoral Fellows

Hao Nguyen, MD, PhD

Assistant Professor in Residence

About Hao

Hao is a surgical urologic oncology fellow in the department of urology at UCSF under the mentorship of Dr. Peter Carroll. 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 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

Postdoctoral Fellow

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.

Contact Duygu: [email protected]sf.edu

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]edu

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]

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]

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]

Goksu Ceyhan, M.S.

Junior Specialist

About Goksu

Andrea Zingaro, M.S.

Junior Specialist

About Andrea

Andrea received his M.S. in Cellular and Molecular Biology from Tuscia University (Italy). Previously he studied the role of RACK1 protein on cell proliferation and chemoresistance (Ceci lab, Tuscia University). He joined the Ruggero Lab as a Junior Specialist in April 2022. Andrea is currently working on the role of translational control in nutrient deprivation and cancer.

Contact Andrea: [email protected]

Emma Figueredo

Junior Specialist

About Emma

Nathan Futoran

Junior Specialist

About Nathan

Nathan joined the Ruggero lab in July 2022 as a Junior Specialist. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Molecular and Cell Biology with an emphasis in Genetics from the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently assisting with research into snoRNA guided modifications of ribosomal RNA along with investigations into the role of the ERα in breast cancer. On his free time, he enjoys reading, playing the piano, and lounging with his cat.

Contact Nathan: [email protected]

Ruggero Lab

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Principal Investigator

Davide Ruggero, PhD

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

Graduate Students

Kenya Bonitto

Research Associates

Lingru Xue, M.S.

Goksu Ceyhan, M.S.

Andrea Zingaro, M.S.

Emma Figueredo

Nathan Futoran