CMFG was founded in 2023 by Praveen Sethupathy, PhD, Chair of Biomedical Sciences and Professor of Physiological Genomics at Cornell University, where he leads a research lab focused on genomic approaches to understand physiology and human disease. 

Executive Committee Members

Anushka Dongre, PhD (Committee Chair)

Dr. Anushka Dongre is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences, College of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell University. Her graduate training in T-cell biology was supervised by Dr. Barbara A. Osborne, at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where she studied the role of non-canonical Notch signaling in regulating T-cell function. For her postdoctoral training, she was keen on applying her skills as an immunologist to better understand cancer progression. This led her to pursue her postdoctoral work in the laboratory of Dr. Robert A. Weinberg, at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, MA. Here, she demonstrated that the Epithelial-Mesenchymal Plasticity (EMP) contributes to immunosuppression and drives refractory responses of breast cancers to immune checkpoint blockade therapy. Her lab is centered on understanding and targeting EMP-driven immunoresistance mechanisms to potentiate the response of breast tumors to immune checkpoint blockade therapies.

Meng Wang, PhD

Dr. Meng Wang obtained his MD/PhD from the University of Cambridge and MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in the UK. He trained in internal medicine at King’s College Hospital in London followed by hematology specialization at Cambridge University Hospitals. As a Cancer Research UK Clinician Scientist Fellow, he conducted his postdoc research into formaldehyde as a cause of DNA damage in blood stem cells at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and Cambridge Stem Cell Institute. Dr. Wang is currently an Assistant Professor at the Division of Nutritional Sciences and Adjunct Assistant Professor at Biomedical Sciences in CVM where his lab studies metabolism and DNA damage.

Zeribe Nwosu, PhD 

Dr. Zeribe Nwosu is an NIH Cornell Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST) Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics. He obtained his PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of Heidelberg, Germany, where he studied liver cancer metabolism in the lab of Prof. Steven Dooley. Thereafter, he joined the labs of Dr. Costas Lyssiotis and Prof. Marina Pasca di Magliano at the University of Michigan, where he did postdoctoral research focusing on pancreatic cancer metabolism, the role of tumor microenvironment and therapeutic prospects of targeting metabolism. He joined the faculty at Cornell in 2023. He is a member of the graduate fields of Biochemistry, Molecular, and Cell Biology (BMCB), Genetics, Genomics and Development (GGD), and Biomedical and Biological Sciences (BBS).