Since our lab is located at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, it means every day we are reminded by our own patient population of the severity and urgency of every cancer diagnosis. Improving our care of cancer patients relies not just on improved therapies, but also improved diagnostics and molecular characterization of tumors so that we can improve therapies for poorly understood and clinical intractable cancer types. We strongly believe that basic science fuels clinical discoveries and is foundational to the biomedical research enterprise. We are therefore committed to rigorous and thoughtful scientific scholarship that serves the interest of the public good.
Our laboratory is also an incubator for young scientists in training. We are committed to a thoughtful, open and non-judgemental research environment. We work hard but we work reasonably. We balance our lives outside of the lab, but we remain very committed to experimental and analytical rigor. While it seems diversity is falling out of favor nationally and in academia, we feel otherwise. We believe that having scientists from diverse backgrounds, to include race, sexuality, gender, religion and nationality, makes us better. We talk openly about science’s failure to train a diverse workforce and what we must do to improve this.