Humsa Venkatesh

Dr. Venkatesh’s research studies the reciprocal interactions between the nervous system and cancers. Her work emphasizes the electrical components of tumor pathophysiology and highlights the extent to which the neural activity controls and facilitate disease progression. The understanding of these co-opting mechanisms has led to novel strategies to broadly treat cancers, by disabling their ability to electrically integrate into neural circuitry. Her pioneering research in this emerging field of cancer neuroscience aims to harness the systems level microenvironmental dependencies of tumor growth to develop innovative therapeutic treatments.

Humsa Venkatesh received her undergraduate degree in Chemical Biology from the University of California, Berkeley and her Ph.D. in Cancer Biology from Stanford University. She is now starting a Cancer Neuroscience research program as Assistant Professor at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. She has recently been recognized by the MIT Technology Review as a Pioneer Under 35, been named a Searle Scholar, and is the recipient of the AAAS Wachtel Prize in Cancer Research.