Lab NEWS!
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April 2025 Dr. Mariam Khaled has been invited to present an update on her project on BCKA in LMD at the AACR Annual Meeting 2025. Mariam is also awarded the Scholar-In-Training Award for this work (a second one in her career!). Congratulations, Mariam!
Febraury 2025 Dr. Inna Smalley is named the Moffitt Junior Research Faculty of the Year.
January 2025 Taryn Rauff and Debora Endo Colodete join the I. Smalley Lab! Taryn and Debora are graduate students in the Molecular Medicine Department at the USF Morsani College of Medicine. Welcome Taryn and Debora!
December 2025 The lab successfully escapes from the Antidote lab-themed escape room, just in time to share some pizza at Armature Works. Great fun at our lab holiday outing!
September 2024 Dr. Inna Smalley is appointed as the Director for the Cancer Biology Major in the Cancer PhD Program at Moffitt.
May 2024: Poojitha Swaminathan joins the lab. Poojitha is an undergraduate research intern, currently studying towards an undergraduate degree at USF.
April 2024 Dr. Hasan Alhaddad completes his T32 training and obtains a faculty position at USF, congratulations Hasan!
February 2024 Ethan Vallebuona joins the I. Smalley Lab! Ethan is a graduate student in the Cancer Biology PhD Program. Welcome, Ethan!
January 2024 Drs. Inna Smalley and Noemi Andor are awarded the Center of Excellence for Evolutionary Therapy for their new collaborative project titled “Testing karyotype evolution as a biomarker of immune fitness and ICI therapy response in the brain tumor microenvironment."
January 2024 Drs. Inna Smalley and Ana Gomes are awarded an ACS TheoryLab Collaborative Pilot Grant for their collaborative project titled “How the aging tumor microenvironment affects development of leptomeningeal metastases.”
What a great way to wrap up the year with two new primary research preprints from our lab on BiorXiv. Check them out!
December 2023 Drs. Inna Smalley and Ana Gomes are awarded the Donald A. Adam Melanoma and Skin Cancer Center of Excellence (MSCCoE) and Cutaneous Oncology Award for the project titled “Mapping the age-related changes in cerebrospinal fluid of melanoma LMD.”
October 2023 The I. Smalley lab hosts the Moffitt Board of Directors.
October 2023 Dr. Inna Smalley hosts the first ever Moffitt Spatial Omics Retreat. The retreat is a tremendous success, with standing room only!
October 2023 Dr. Mariam Khaled is awarded the Junior Scientist Research Partnership Award for her project, “The role of branched-chain ketoacids in neurological deterioration in breast cancer-leptomeningeal metastasis.” Congratulations, Mariam!
September 2023 Dr. Mohammad Baraa Boozo joins the I. Smalley Lab. Dr. Boozo is a medical doctor from Domascus, Syria. Welcome, Dr. Boozo!
July 2023 With mixed emotions we say goodbye to Ronak Kundalia, who has been accepted to medical school at the University of Florida. We wish Ronak a lot of success!
April 2023 Dr. Inna Smalley is awarded the Research Scholar Grant from the American Cancer Society for the project titled “Improving therapy for leptomeningeal Non-Hodgkin B cell lymphoma by targeting the metabolic tumor microenvironment.”
April 2023 Dr. Mariam Khaled has been invited to present her project on BCKA in LMD at the AACR Annual Meeting 2024 and won the Scholar-In-Training Award for this work. Congratulations, Mariam!
2022 Joint Smalley Labs End of the Year Gathering Showing each-other appreciation and celebrating all of our accomplishments this year :-) And enjoying a fun meal and activities at the beautiful Lettuce Lake Park.
September 20th, 2022
Today we celebrate Mariam’s Birthday and National Postdoc Appreciation Week!! Finally, our first outing since COVID lockdowns. Things are finally getting back to normal...
September 1st, 2022
Funding news: The NCI/NIH has awarded us the R21 grant for the project “Defining and targeting the immune-suppressive metabolic microenvironment of leptomeningeal melanoma metastases.”
July, 2022
Back to where it (single cell analysis) all started! I had the great honor to return back to Cold Spring Harbor Labs to give a lecture for the Single Cell Analysis Course. Same course I took myself in it’s inaugural session back in 2012.
June 7th, 2022
Celebrating Yuan’s Birthday today. Happy B-day, Yuan!
June 1st, 2022
Funding news: The Melanoma Research Alliance has awarded us the Young Investigator Award for the project “Tumor-stroma metabolic crosstalk in melanoma brain metastases”
May 20th, 2022
It was a real honor to sit with our founder Mr. H. Lee Moffitt this evening at the Board of Directors' dinner.
May 11th, 2022
Today Mariam presented at the Moffitt Scientific Symposium her project “Single-cell and multi-omics analysis uncovers immune and metabolic remodeling of CSF environment in leptomeningeal lymphoma”
March 29th, 2022
Today we celebrated Ronak and Oscar’s Birthdays!! What a better way to celebrate than an R group workshop!? Thank you to Oscar for teaching us basic RNAseq analysis using R, everyone learned a lot!
March 1st, 2022
Funding News: Moffitt Cancer Center has awarded our lab the Team Science Grant for the project “Tumor-stroma metabolic crosstalk in melanoma brain metastases.”
January 17th, 2022
Funding News: Moffitt Cancer Center has awarded our lab the Innovative Core Grant for the project “Developing spatial multi-omics approaches for the study of the tumor microenvironment.”
December 21st, 2021
Today we celebrated the holidays and our achievements over the year. We enjoyed some great food and had a Secret Santa gift exchange together with the lab of Keiran Smalley, previous rotation students, and other mentees.
December 11th, 2021
Congratulatons to Chao Zhang for earning his PhD in the lab of Keiran Smalley! Chao was the first graduate student I mentored, so proud to see his accomplishments over the years.
October 2022
Funding news: The Donald A. Adam Melanoma and Skin Cancer Center of Excellence (MSCCoE) and Cutaneous Oncology has given us an award for the project “Sensitizing leptomeningeal melanoma to checkpoint inhibitor therapy."
November 20th, 2021
Well done to everyone from our lab who participated in the annual Miles for Moffitt fundraising run. Ronak ran 10k, Clayton ran 5k, and I ran 10k. All proceeds go to fund cancer research at the Moffitt Cancer Center.
July 1st, 2021
Funding News: The Florida Breast Cancer Foundation has awarded us a Scientific Grant for the project “Defining and targeting the pro-tumorigenic metabolic microenvironment of leptomeningeal metastasis in triple-negative breast cancer.”
September 1st, 2020
Funding News: The NIH/NCI has awarded us an R00 for our work on "Defining the Role of Metabolic Heterogeneity in Melanoma Dissemination and Therapy"