Ghassan Mouneimne, PhD

Cancer Biology Program

Biography

Dr. Mouneimne earned his PhD from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, studying the migratory behavior of invading cancer cells in Dr. John Condeelis’ laboratory. During his postdoctoral training with Dr. Joan Brugge at Harvard Medical School, he pursued new approaches for studying the role of the cytoskeleton in regulating cancer cell invasion, including strategies combining in vitro and in vivo modeling of human cancers with bioinformatic and histological analyses of clinical samples. In his own laboratory, Dr. Mouneimne focuses on understanding the plasticity of invading cancer cells in complex heterogeneous tumor microenvironments, with the goal of developing therapies that are more effective in blocking metastasis. Dr. Mouneimne is currently a tenured associate professor in Cellular and Molecular Medicine.

Cancer Focus

Research in our laboratory is focused on understanding how aberrant structural organization of the cytoskeleton influences cellular behavior, such as cancer cell invasion and metastasis. The regulation of cellular behavior by structural remodeling of the cytoskeleton exemplifies the paradigm of “structure regulates function” at the cellular level. Our goal is to identify distinct actin cytoskeletal architectures that impact the response of cancer cells to well-known genetic and microenvironmental factors during cancer progression.