PhD students

I take PhD students through NYU’s Vilcek Institute of Graduate Biomedical Sciences programs in Molecular, Cellular, and Organismal Biology, and I am happy to host rotations who are enrolled in the program.

Be clear-eyed about what this lab is. It is a physician-scientist laboratory, and much of what we do is anchored to patients: a cachexia clinic, a prospective cohort, clinical trials. That environment is a genuine advantage if you want your mechanistic work to connect to human disease, and a genuine mismatch if you want a purely reductionist thesis with no clinical framing. Both approaches are great. Come rotate to find out which phenotype you are.

What a PhD thesis looks like here. Your five to six years are the longest continuous block anyone in the lab has, and the projects I would give you reflect that. These are the questions that need a full mechanistic dissection rather than a two-year answer: how tumor-secreted factors reach and act on host tissues, how hepatic metabolism is reprogrammed during tumor progression, how insulin regulates glucose metabolism in the liver or skeletal muscle, how fructose is handled by the intestine. Techniques include mouse physiology and surgery, whole-body metabolic phenotyping including metabolomics and LC/MS methods, single-cell and spatial transcriptomics, proximity labeling proteomics, and mass spectrometry, alongside human samples.

What I commit to. A thesis project that is yours and that you take with you. Support for an F31 or equivalent, with protected time to write it. First authorship on your primary project. An early and honest midpoint assessment. Introductions to our collaborators, including through the CANCAN Cancer Grand Challenges consortium, which means your work is seen outside this building.

What I expect. That you rotate before committing. That you can eventually defend the biology to an audience that does not care about the clinical application, which means you own the mechanism, not just the phenotype. That you tell me when something is not working.

To arrange a rotation, Email me with the subject line "PhD rotation." Tell me your program and year, what you have worked on, and one question from our work you would want to pursue. A paragraph is enough.

See also MD/PhD students, and postdoctoral fellows if you are finishing your degree.