Penn Postdocs in the News: Sydney Shaffer, M.D., Ph.D., named Hartwell Fellow
Penn Postdoctoral Researcher Sydney Shaffer receives Hartwell Fellowship for pediatric cancer research
PHILADELPHIA, PA — Sydney M. Shaffer, M.D., Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Cancer Biology at the University of Pennsylvania, has been selected as a 2017 Hartwell Fellow. Under the mentorship of Junwei Shi, Ph.D., Dr. Shaffer will develop new cellular imaging tools to study single-cell heterogeneity in pediatric cancers using RNA-targeting CRISPR/Cas systems.
Dr. Shaffer’s proposed research addresses a fundamental challenge in pediatric cancer: tumors can contain diverse populations of cells whose molecular characteristics and responses to treatment differ, while conventional tumor profiling provides only a snapshot of this complexity. Her Hartwell project seeks to develop methods capable of tracking RNA activity dynamically in individual living cancer cells, providing a new way to study how cellular heterogeneity evolves over time.
Dr. Shaffer has deep roots at Penn. She earned both her M.D. from the Perelman School of Medicine and Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania. During her doctoral research with Arjun Raj, Ph.D., she investigated single-cell variation in cancer drug resistance and developed RNA imaging technologies.
Her graduate research included first-author work published in Nature demonstrating how pre-existing differences among individual cancer cells, followed by epigenetic reprogramming, can contribute to resistance to targeted therapies.
As a Hartwell Fellow, Dr. Shaffer will combine her expertise in single-cell analysis and imaging with the Shi Lab’s expertise in CRISPR technologies to develop new approaches for studying pediatric cancer biology and, ultimately, improving the molecular information available to guide treatment.
We are proud to celebrate Dr. Shaffer and her continued contributions to biomedical research at Penn.