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University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, Ph.D., Molecular Biology, 2013
Hood College, Frederick, Maryland, M.S., Biomedical Sciences, 2007
Hood College, Frederick, Maryland, B.A., Biochemistry, 2004
Bhairavi (Vivi) Tolani, Ph.D., M.S. is member of the Thoracic Oncology Lab, having initially joined the lab in June 2014 as a postdoctoral scholar. Dr. Tolani's research is focused on developing targeted therapies, small molecule inhibitors and biologics, for lung cancer.
Dr. Tolani provides research mentorship and supervision to surgical residents in UCSF's program as well as visiting thoracic surgeons, technicians and high school students. Prior to beginning her second postdoctoral fellowship at UCSF, she worked on cancer immunology as a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Research Institute.
Dr. Tolani earned her Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine under the mentorship of Preet Chaudhary M.D., Ph.D., chief of the Nohl Division of Hematology and Blood Diseases at Keck. A self-starter, she convinced the lab to undertake a new project involving small molecule BET epigenetic inhibitor drugs to target blood cancers in collaboration with Dr. James Bradner at Harvard's Dana Farber Cancer Institute. Her doctoral research resulted in 5 peer-reviewed publications, and presentations at The American Society of Hematology (ASH) and The Gordon Research Conference.
Over the past 10 years, Dr. Tolani's cancer research experience has been diverse including breast cancer, ovarian cancer, cervical cancer, lung cancer and hematological malignancies spanning academia, industry and the National Institutes of Health. Prior to graduate school, she worked at 3 biotechnology companies [Invitrogen Life Technologies, Lonza, & Digene (Qiagen)] for 3 years. While at Digene, she contributed to the development of a test to detect cervical cancer in women. Her work in industry earned her "Job Excellence" and "No Matter What it Takes" awards at Invitrogen Life Technologies and Lonza respectively. Concurrently she earned her M.S. in Biomedical Sciences while conducting her thesis research on cancer stem cells and the Hedgehog pathway in breast cancer at the National Cancer Institute.