Welcoming the Keystone Symposia Fellow's Class of 2026!

By Jill Abrell

This year’s awardees rose to the top of an extremely qualified pool of applicants, demonstrating not only impressive accomplishments in their research, but also strong leadership skills and dedication to mentorship in their communities, and science at large.  

We are honored to introduce the Keystone Fellows Class of 2026. This cohort reflects remarkable scientific promise, leadership, and a commitment to advancing research with real-world impact. The Fellows Program remains one of our most important investments in the future of life sciences, fostering connections, mentorship, and insights that deepen our community and strengthen the global scientific enterprise. I look forward to the discoveries and collaborations that will emerge from this exceptional group.

– President & CEO Dr. Jamie Baumgartner

Read about each new Fellow's research and accomplishments below! 

Incoming Fellows will start their Program experience in January, convening in Boulder, Colorado to attend the Keystone Symposia Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) meeting, where distinguished scientists from across academia, industry, government, and the non-profit sectors will meet to develop the 2028 conference portfolio. The Keystone Fellows actively participate in subcommittee sessions to shape conference topic ideas, content and peer review.  

Fellows will also have an opportunity to connect with their peers from the graduating Fellows Class of 2025 to expand their networks and learn firsthand how to make the most of the program. In addition, they will be paired with a member of the Keystone Symposia SAB for direct mentorship throughout the year – and sometimes beyond. This unique relationship provides each Fellow with one-on-one guidance on career-development and professional growth to succeed along their career path and navigate career challenges. 

Several dedicated members of Keystone Symposia's SAB and Keystone Fellows Community have contributed their time and expertise to advising our Fellows and making this program so impactful. We would like to thank the following individuals who served as mentors to the 2025 Fellows: Jean Lim, Lora Heisler, Anne Murphy, Patricia Beltrão-Braga, Elizabeth Villa, Manu Platt, Jason Gestwicki, Robert Hofmeister, Karen Adelman, Stacey Finley, Richard Ransohoff, and Tony Hunter. 

In addition to one-on-one mentorship, Fellows will participate in monthly “Fellows Fridays,” virtual sessions for dynamic group discussions with experts from our Board of Directors, Scientific Advisory Board, the Fellows alumni network, and other key thought-leaders in the Keystone Symposia community. Fellows Fridays are designed to provide Fellows with expert advice on essential topics such as grant writing, tenure strategies, publishing, mentorship, scientific leadership and more. Part of the series is specifically designed for Postdoc Fellows to guide them in the unique challenges of transitioning from a trainee to an independent researcher. 

Find out more about Fellows Fridays programming in the Annual Update below. 

With the 2026 class, the Keystone Symposia Fellows Community now comprises 124 esteemed scientists, many of whom now hold leadership roles throughout academia, industry and government. Established in 2009, the Keystone Symposia Fellows Program aims to provide early-stage independent researchers and postdoctoral scientists with the skills, professional connections and visibility to support their success at this pivotal career stage. Importantly, “alumni” Fellows remain connected to Keystone Symposia, as speakers and organizers of our conferences, as mentors to current Fellows, and as strategic advisors on our Board of Directors and Scientific Advisory Board, thereby further advancing our mission to promote inclusive excellence in the life sciences.   

View previous Fellows Classes in the Fellows Directory here.  

Read more about the Fellows Program in last year's Annual Update HERE!   

We thank all the generous sponsors who have made the Fellows Program Class of 2026 possible. Their funding is essential to the strength, value and longevity of the program, and to our ability to support these incredible scientists to become leaders in their research fields and their communities. 

• Individuals: Cherié Butts, Bei Zhang & Mark Erion, Aristides Economides & Heike Doerr 

• Organizations: Cytokinetics, Inc., Endocrine Society  

We welcome additional sponsors! 

Please consider joining us in our mission to support the next generation of scientists in the biomedical and life science workforce!  

Contact: DLSP@keystonesymposia.org 

Donate to Keystone Symposia Fellows Program Here! 

Keystone Symposia Fellows Class of 2026 

Post-Doctoral Fellows 

Jeremiah Afolabi, DVM, PhD 

Vanderbilt University Medical Center  

Field of Study: Cardiovascular  

Dr. Jeremiah Afolabi is a Cardiovascular Medicine T32 Fellow in the lab of Dr. Annet Kirabo at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He holds DVM and MVSc degrees from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and a PhD in Molecular and Translational Physiology, with a concentration in renal physiology, from the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis, TN. During his graduate studies, he developed expertise in translational porcine and rodent models, utilizing non-invasive and surgical techniques to study acute kidney injury. He showed that Endothelin Converting Enzyme-1-driven Endothelin-1 production and downstream activation of TRPC3-dependent renal vasoconstriction contribute to rhabdomyolysis-induced AKI, leading to first-author publications in high-impact journals and recognition through an American Heart Association predoctoral fellowship.

His current research investigates how excessive sodium triggers myeloid-specific endoplasmic reticulum stress, leading to salt-sensitive hypertension, a paradigm shift from traditional hemodynamic-focused approaches. He also investigates factors driving sex-specific differences in salt sensitivity of blood pressure. Jeremiah’s career trajectory reflects a strategic progression toward addressing cardiovascular pathophysiology through an integrative, multidisciplinary approach. His long-term research interest lies at the intersection of AI/ML, immunology, functional genomics, and vascular biology, with a focus on cardiovascular disease. 

Luis Cedeño-Rosario, PhD 

University of Utah 

Field of Study: Cell Biology 

Dr. Cedeño-Rosario was born and raised in Puerto Rico, and completed a bachelor’s degree with honors in Industrial Chemistry at the University of Puerto Rico at Humacao. Prior to joining the University of Utah as a postdoctoral fellow, he completed his PhD training with Dr. Deborah N. Chadee at the University of Toledo in Ohio. There, he studied how the MAP3K protein Mixed Lineage Kinase 3 (MLK3) regulates ovarian cancer cell division and how it is regulated during this process.

Now as a Burroughs Wellcome Fund postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Jared Rutter's lab, Dr. Cedeño-Rosario is studying how the Mitochondrial Pyruvate Carrier (MPC) is regulated by the Wnt/β-catenin pathway and the significance of this regulation in cell metabolism and cell fate. 

Thu Doan, PhD 

University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus 

Field of Study: Immunology 

 Dr. Thu “Autumn” Doan’s long-term research interests focus on understanding how interactions between immune cell populations shape immune responses and disease outcomes. During her PhD training, Dr. Doan joined Dr. Beth Tamburini’s laboratory to investigate how lymph node stromal cells (LNSCs) retain vaccine-derived antigens and enhance protective T cell immunity against subsequent unrelated infections. This work elucidated the mechanisms by which LNSCs transfer antigens to migratory dendritic cells (DCs) for processing and cross-presentation to memory T cells. She earned her PhD in Immunology from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. 

Currently, as a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Rachel Friedman’s laboratory, Dr. Doan is studying how human myeloid cells within pancreatic islets interact with T cell responses during type 1 diabetes progression. Recognizing the growing importance of computational approaches in immunology, she is actively developing bioinformatics skills in R and Python to analyze large-scale datasets, enabling her to bridge wet-lab experimentation with computational analysis. Dr. Doan’s long-term career goal is to become an independent bioinformatician specializing in type 1 diabetes research. Given the complexity of type 1 diabetes pathogenesis and the rapid advancement of single-cell and spatial transcriptomic technologies, there is a critical need for researchers who are both computationally proficient and deeply knowledgeable about immune cell interactions.  

Beyond her scientific pursuits, Dr. Doan is deeply committed to fostering supportive and inclusive environments that promote successful mentorship for the next generation of scientists. Growing up in an immigrant family with limited socioeconomic opportunities, she learned firsthand how transformative mentorship can be. 

Oriana Teran Pumar, PhD 

University of Miami 

Field of Study: Cancer  

Dr. Terán Pumar acquired her PhD in Biochemistry from Cornell University where she was fully funded by an NSF GRFP and SUNY fellowships throughout her studies. She then decided to pursue a postdoctoral fellowship under the mentorship of Dr. Defne Bayik at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. While her doctorate work focused on mechanistically defining a new mTOR complex and its role in cancer cell survival, she now hopes to do translational studies to delineate the role of the immune system in brain tumors.

As a Venezuelan immigrant, Dr. Terán Pumar is passionate about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts. She founded and now leads the Postdoctoral Council for the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, where she has started numerous initiatives to improve postdoctoral training and is also the trainee representative in the Cancer Leadership Education Council, where she continually advocates for the needs of the postdoctoral and graduate community. Furthermore, she mentors through the undergraduate summer research programs (SURF) and serves as an admission committee member and speaker for the program.  

Esteban Vazques-Hidalgo, PhD 

Case Western Reserve University 

Field of Study:  Genetics / Genomics 

Dr. Esteban Vazquez-Hidalgo is a Postdoctoral Scholar at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, where he studies how genetic variation influences gene regulation and contributes to neurological disease risk. His research focuses on allele-specific expression and regulatory mechanisms in complex traits such as Alzheimer’s disease, integrating computational genomics, statistical genetics, and transcriptomic analysis. His work leverages large-scale genomic data to understand cis-regulatory variation and how regulatory dosage and population ancestry shape disease-relevant gene expression. 

Dr. Vazquez-Hidalgo earned his PhD in Computational Science through the joint program between San Diego State University and Claremont Graduate University. During his doctoral training, he developed mathematical and biophysical models to study cellular and physiological processes, including published work in cellular biomechanics and force generation. This interdisciplinary foundation informs his current work in genomics, where he applies rigorous computational modeling to complex biological and population-level questions. 

Beyond his research, Dr. Vazquez-Hidalgo is deeply committed to mentorship and inclusive scientific training. He is actively involved in mentoring students and early-career scientists and regularly engages with national diversity-focused scientific communities through organizations such as SACNAS and ABRCMS. His professional service reflects a commitment to broadening participation in biomedical research and fostering supportive, equitable training environments. 

Early-Career Scientists 

Lillian Brady, PhD 

University of Alabama at Birmingham  

Field of Study: Neurobiology 

Dr. Lillian J. Brady is a native of Jackson, Mississippi, and a two-time graduate of Alcorn State University, a Historically Black College/University (HBCU), where she earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry in 2009 and a Master of Science degree in Biotechnology in 2011. Dr. Brady obtained her PhD from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) in the Department of Neurobiology, under the mentorship of Dr. Lynn Dobrunz, where her research focused on outlining the effects of antipsychotic medications and other pharmacological agents targeting the dopamine system, on the local circuitry of the hippocampus, which controls learning, memory, and cognition.  

After completing her PhD, she joined the Vanderbilt University Department of Pharmacology and the Vanderbilt Center for Addiction Research as part of the first cohort of Academic Pathways Postdoctoral Research Fellows. Her postdoctoral research, funded by an NIH MOSAIC K99/R00 Career Transition Award through the National Institute on Drug Abuse, focused on sex differences in nicotinic receptor regulation of dopamine release mechanisms underlying reward circuitry in substance use disorder. 

Dr. Brady returned to UAB in May of 2023 to open her independent laboratory in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurobiology. Her research program focuses on investigating how biological sex and hormones modulate the pharmacodynamics of medications/drugs of abuse on neural circuit activity underlying environmental context-reward associations in substance use disorder. 

Alex Chaim, PhD 

University of California, San Diego 

Field of Study: Cell Biology 

Born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela, Dr. Chaim graduated from the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas with a B.S. in Biology where he researched novel biodegradable three-dimensional scaffolds for their use in cartilage tissue engineering. He then joined the Department of Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, MA for his graduate studies. As part of his PhD in Leona Samson's Laboratory, Dr. Chaim tried to answer the question: why do some individuals develop cancer and degenerative disease while others remain healthy? He focused on the study of cellular DNA repair capacity to tackle this question and development of molecular tools to measure inter-individual differences in DNA repair capacity.

Dr. Chaim then joined Gene Yeo's laboratory at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) as a postdoctoral fellow where he worked in understanding the effect of nucleic acid damage on RNA Binding Protein (RBP) biology during the development of neurodegenerative diseases as well as in Autism and Cancer treatment. During his tenure in the Yeo Lab, Dr. Chaim also established single cell technologies for the study of RNA-RBP interactions. During his postdoc, he was an NIH/NIGMS K12 – IRACDA, UC San Diego Chancellor's and NINDS K99 Pathway to Independence Postdoctoral Fellow. In 2023, Alex joined the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology at UC San Diego as an Assistant Professor, where he established the Chaim Lab focused on RNA damage biology. His independent research program investigates how RNA damage contributes to neurodegeneration and cancer treatment, utilizing cutting-edge sequencing and proteomics approaches.

Dr. Chaim's lab operates under the motto "Great people and happy people do great science!" He deeply enjoys mentoring and has done so at all stages of his career. He believes that his own mentors played a very important part in his training and development as a person and a scientist and that he wouldn't be where he is right now without their help, support and patience. Beyond his scientific contributions, Alex is a passionate advocate for diversity and inclusion in academia. He founded CaSAS (Community and Science Advancements in Spanish), a seminar series that provides Spanish-speaking scientists with a platform to present their research and network in an inclusive environment.  

Camila Coelho, PhD 

Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai 

Field of Study: Infectious Diseases  

Dr. Camila Coelho is an Assistant Professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where she leads a research group investigating how human B cells and antibodies protect against emerging and re-emerging pathogens, with a focus on mpox. She earned her PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (Brazil) and completed postdoctoral training at Georgetown University, the NIH, and the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, making key discoveries in malaria antibody biology and human B cell responses to COVID-19 vaccination. She has served on multiple NIH study sections, reviews for major biomedical journals, and was recently honored with a Rising Star Award from the International Union of Immunological Societies and named a Sinsheimer Scholar. 

Joomyung Vicky Jun, PhD 

University of Illinois Urbana Champaign 

Field of Study: Biochemistry 

Born and raised in Seoul, Korea, Vicky received her B.Sc. degree in Chemical Biology from the UC Berkeley, performing undergraduate research with Ken Raymond. She then worked with Ron Zuckermann at the Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Vicky completed her PhD in chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania as the first joint student of David Chenoweth and James Petersson. She was a Koch Institution for Integrative Cancer Research (KI) and Life Sciences Research Foundation (LSRF) postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Ron Raines at MIT.

In 2024, she joined the department of chemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as a faculty member in chemical biology. Her laboratory integrates chemistry, biology, and engineering to develop chemical tools that enable and elucidate the intracellular delivery of protein therapeutics. Her research focuses on reversible protein modification for protein-based drug delivery, fluorogenic nanoparticles to investigate the cellular uptake mechanism of biologics, and trifunctional activity-based probes for molecular imaging and new target discovery. Her long-term vision is to advance protein therapeutics as next-generation therapies for currently undruggable diseases. 

Charalampos Lazaris, PhD 

Novartis Biomedical Research 

Field of Study: Genetics / Genomics 

Dr. Charalampos (Harris) Lazaris is a Senior Data Scientist in Novartis Oncology Data Science in Cambridge, MA. There, he leads integrative genomics and epigenomics efforts to uncover transcriptional dependencies in solid tumors and collaborates with multidisciplinary teams to exploit these vulnerabilities therapeutically. Transcriptional addiction—states in which tumor cells rely abnormally and persistently on dysregulated transcriptional programs and their key regulators for survival and growth—is a central theme of his work across gene regulation and computational biology. 

Dr. Lazaris earned his first degree in Biological Applications and Technologies from the University of Ioannina, Greece. He then completed an MSc in Molecular Biology–Biomedicine at the University of Crete, supported by an Onassis Foundation Scholarship, and an MSc in Bioinformatics with Distinction from the University of Edinburgh, UK. He subsequently earned an MS and PhD from the Systems and Computational Biomedicine Program of the Sackler Institute at NYU School of Medicine, where he was co-mentored by Professors Iannis Aifantis and Aristotelis Tsirigos. 

During his PhD, Dr. Lazaris investigated how alterations in the three-dimensional structure of the genome affect gene expression in T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL). He co-led influential studies showing how compromised boundaries of topologically associating domains (TADs)—self-interacting chromatin regions that organize the genome into functional units—allow aberrant oncogene activation. He also co-authored a key study showing how leukemia cells hijack the HSF1-driven stress response pathway, creating a non-oncogene transcriptional addiction that sustains cancer cell survival. These efforts established him as an expert in transcriptional control and nuclear organization in cancer. During his graduate training, he received the Gerondelis Foundation Scholarship for PhD support, multiple travel awards for conferences and courses including HHMI, Regeneron, and NIGMS funding for advanced Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory training. 

As a Bioinformatics Scientist in the Young Lab at the Whitehead Institute and an Associated Scientist at the Klarman Cell Observatory of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Dr. Lazaris collaborated with an interdisciplinary team of scientists from the Whitehead Institute, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and the Broad Institute. Together, they dissected transcriptional dependencies in multiple myeloma, and he demonstrated how specific transcription factors drive transcriptional addiction, creating exploitable vulnerabilities in cancer cells for therapeutic intervention. These contributions, combined with his role at Novartis, cement his status as a thought leader in gene regulation and cancer epigenetics. 

Dr. Lazaris is deeply committed to mentoring and community building. He previously was Vice-Chair of the Broad Institute's NextGen Association for Postdocs and Graduate Students and currently serves as President of the New York University Graduate School of Arts and Science Doctoral Alumni Association (DAA). Through these roles, he champions career development and inclusive excellence while mentoring and empowering the next generation of biomedical scientists. 

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Meet the Author

Jill Abrell

Project Manager & Program Specialist, Scientific Programming

Jill Abrell holds a BA in Environmental Studies from the University of Michigan and brings a strong foundation in program coordination, communication, and public engagement from her previous work in the education field. At Keystone Symposia, she coordinates the Scientific Advisory Board meetings to support the development of Keystone Symposia’s conference portfolio, in addition to coordinating mentorship programming, such as Career Roundtables and the Keystone Symposia Fellows Program.

Return to the December 2025 Keypoint Newsletter