Team Members

Kristina is a Proshek-Fulbright Scholar joining the Bazzaro lab from Slovakia. She earned her Master of Pharmacy degree from the University of Veterinary Medicine and Pharmacy in Kosice and is currently a Ph.D. student in medical pharmacology at the Faculty of Medicine, Pavol Jozef Safarik University (Kosice, Slovakia). Her research focuses on the molecular mechanisms behind chemoresistance in ovarian cancer — exploring why cancer cells stop responding to treatment and how therapy can be made more effective.

Harith Aswad Ismail received his M.S. in Molecular Pharmacology and Therapeutics (MPaT) from the University of Minnesota and joined the Bazzaro lab. He enjoys doing cell culture, and has experience in live-cell imaging, molecular cloning, and protein-based assays to study treatment response. Harith has a strong interest in translational research, and outside the lab, he enjoys cooking and recently picked up volleyball.

Zejie Yan received her M.S. in Biostatistics from Georgetown University and joined the Bazzaro lab. She specializes in the analysis of single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data, with experience in quality control, dimensionality reduction, cell-type annotation, trajectory inference, and differential expression analysis at both the cell-state and donor level. Her research spans cancer as well as neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's — investigating how cellular heterogeneity and inter-patient variability shape disease progression and therapeutic response.