Charlotte Bellamy, 30 years old, is a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Professor John Blenis at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City. She obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Genetics from Queen Mary University of London before completing a Master’s degree in Molecular and Cellular Biology at Sorbonne University. During her Master’s training, she completed research internships at the Paris Brain Institute in the laboratory of Professor Marc Sanson and at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston in the laboratory of Dr Keith Ligon, where she developed an interest in brain tumor biology and therapeutic resistance.
She subsequently completed her PhD in the Sanson–Huillard laboratory at the Paris Brain Institute, with a visiting research position in the lab of Prof. Alexandra Newton at UCSD, where she investigated how a recurrent PKCα mutation drives the rare brain tumor chordoid glioma. Using biochemical, proteomic, and single-nucleus transcriptomic approaches, she demonstrated that the mutant kinase acts through a pseudokinase, dominant-negative mechanism and identified β2 tanycytes as the cell of origin. This work resulted in a first-author publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Her current research focuses on understanding how breast cancers develop resistance to mTOR-targeted therapies. Her scientific interests include cell signaling, kinase biology, cancer cell plasticity, and therapeutic resistance, with the goal of identifying new strategies to improve targeted cancer therapies.