William R. Pitts, MD ’33 and W. Reid Pitts, Jr., MD ’67 Research Scholars with Intelligent Curiosity Fund
Benefactor Report
October 2025
Letter From
the Dean
October 22, 2025
Dear Mrs. Pitts,
Thank you for your and your family’s generosity to the Scholars in Medicine program at Harvard Medical School through the William R. Pitts, MD ’33 and W. Reid Pitts, Jr., MD ’67 Research Scholars with Intelligent Curiosity Fund.
The Fund supported 13 students during the 2024–2025 academic year. Their projects encompassed a wide range of subjects, from the use of machine learning in precision chemotherapy to the development of new T-cell receptor–based HIV therapies. This report contains information about each student and their mentors, and highlights one project—a trial, designed by two HMS students, of new immunotherapy strategies to treat breast cancer—in greater detail.
For fifteen years, gifts from the Pitts family and your friends and colleagues have immersed HMS students in the methods and tools of medical research, introduced them to mentors who have helped shape their careers, and provided them with unique opportunities to study a diverse range of research subjects. Thank you for your support. I hope you and your family continue to enjoy learning about the young physician–scientists whose careers you have helped launch.
With sincere gratitude,
George Q. Daley, MD, PhD
George Q Daley, MD, PhD | Dean of the Faculty of Medicine | Caroline Shields Walker Professor of Medicine
25 Shattuck Street, Boston, MA 02115 | t: (617) 432-1501 | e: George_Daley@hms.harvard.edu
SCHOLARS IN MEDICINE
The HMS Scholars in Medicine Program provides every Harvard medical student with the opportunity to pursue a mentored scholarly experience analyzing a medical or health-related question, issue, or problem in depth. Students can approach issues through a wide range of disciplines in the biomedical sciences, clinical sciences, humanities, arts, or other fields. The following information about the projects students undertook in the 2024–2025 academic year reflects the varied interests of our students. Thank you for your support as we continue to inspire, and be inspired by, the next generation of dedicated physician–scientists.
Lynn Bi, Class of 2027, "Identifying Predictors of Immunotherapy Response and Resistance in Metastatic Triple-Negative Breast Cancer" (Mentor: Eliezer Van Allen, MD)
Alejandro Diaz, Class of 2027, "Neuromodulatory Influence of the Celiac Plexus on Gastroparesis Pathophysiology in Swine" (Mentor: Shriya Srinivasan, PhD)
Rose Gold, Class of 2027, "Classification of Live/Dead Spheroid Phenotypes via Dynamic Micro-Optical Coherence Tomography (D𝜇OCT) Imaging" (Mentors: Hinnerk Schulz-Hildebrandt, PhD, and Guillermo Tearney, MD, PhD)
Sharon Jiang, Class of 2027, "Genomic and Machine Learning–Driven Patient-to-Patient Matchmaking for Precision Oncology" (Mentor: Eliezer Van Allen, MD)
Soo Hyun Kim, Class of 2027, "Genome-Wide Association Study Identifies Novel Associated Loci and Suggests Endothelial and Scleral Involvement in Central Serous Chorioretinopathy" (Mentor: Elizabeth J. Rossin, MD, PhD)
Erica Langan, Class of 2031, "Defining Effective Strategies to Integrate Multi-Sample Single-Nucleus ATAC-Seq Datasets via a Multimodal Guided Approach" (Mentor: Soumya Raychaudhuri, MD, PhD)
Katelyn Li, Class of 2027, "Identifying Predictors of Immunotherapy Response and Resistance in Metastatic Triple-Negative Breast Cancer" (Mentor: Eliezer Van Allen, MD)
Samantha Marglous, Class of 2031, "Serum Antibody Screening Using Glycan Arrays" (Mentor: Brandon DeKosky, PhD)
Katherine Pan, Class of 2028, "Investigating Sex Differences in Glioblastoma: Immune Response and Potential MicroRNA Modulation of Mpp1 in Microglia" (Mentor: David Page, MD)
Audrey Phan, Class of 2027, "Neural Signatures of Social and Emotional Cognition: Insights from Intracranial Dynamics" (Mentor: Ziv Williams, MD)
Aarthi Vijayakumar, Class of 2028, "Development of a Novel T-Cell Receptor–Based Therapeutic for the Treatment of HIV" (Mentor: Gaurav D. Gaiha, MD, DPhil)
Chelsea Wang, Class of 2027, "The Exposome and Income Disparities in All-Cause Mortality in the United States" (Mentor: Chirag Patel, PhD)
Matthew Yonas, Class of 2027, "Burden Analysis of Genetic Variants in Pediatric Erythromelalgia" (Mentors: Don Daniel Ocay, PhD, and Charles Berde, MD, PhD)
Harvard MD students present their research projects at the 85th annual Soma Weiss Student Research Day (March 18, 2025) in the Tosteson Medical Education Center Atrium.
2024–2025 Awardees
Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is the most aggressive breast cancer subtype, associated with an early age of onset and high rates of metastasis, recurrence, and mortality. TNBC lacks molecular targets for hormone-based or receptor-blocking therapies, so chemotherapy remains the primary treatment, despite its high relapse rates and limited survival benefits. In the past decade, immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) have transformed cancer treatment by helping the immune system recognize and eliminate tumor cells. Given TNBC’s highly immunogenic nature, ICIs are the most promising therapeutic strategy for this cancer. Lynn Bi and Katelyn Li seek to elucidate determinants of response or resistance to ICIs in order to better predict which patients with TNBC will benefit from ICI treatment.
To this end, they and their team conducted a multicenter, randomized phase II trial to evaluate the efficacy of carboplatin (a chemotherapy drug) with and without nivolumab (an ICI), with a total of 75 patients with unresectable or metastatic TNBC. They collected tumor biopsy samples and whole blood control samples from patients at
Lynn Bi and Katelyn Li (third and second from right, respectively) among other winners and runners-up of poster prizes at the 85th Annual Soma Weiss Student Research Day.
baseline, on treatment, and at progression, then performed whole-exome sequencing, bulk RNA sequencing, and single-nucleus multiome sequencing. These bioinformatic analyses identified molecular biomarkers that marked responders and non-responders to ICI therapy.
Through whole-exome and bulk RNA sequencing analyses, Bi and Li identified an association between tumor mutational burden and progression-free survival, as well as an upregulation of immune-related pathways in responders compared to non-responders at baseline. Single-cell multiomic sequencing analyses revealed that T cells from responders were enriched for exhausted CD8+ T-cell signatures, while T cells from non-responders were enriched for memory T-cell signatures at baseline. Ongoing analysis will explore how gene regulatory regions drive these divergent T-cell states and how tumor-immune interactions shape treatment response.