Ramin Sakhtemani, PhD

Hello! I'm Ramin Sakhtemani, a chemist turned computational cancer biologist.

After graduating with a BSc in Chemistry from University of Tehran, I moved to the USA to pursue a PhD at Wayne State University. There, I had to decide whether to continue my education in something familiar, like organic chemistry, or to walk into the unknown and follow my stronger interest. Despite a lack of any biology background, I joined the biochemistry program. I did so because I was fascinated by biology and the theory of evolution.

During my PhD, I worked on enzymatic deamination of cytosine bases by AID/APOBEC3 enzymes. This is one of the main endogenous mechanisms by which DNA mutations arise, with major implications in cancer. My doctoral dissertation focused on developing a novel DNA sequencing method to map genomic uracils to characterize those deaminase enzymes. This pulled me into the world of coding and bioinformatics. I built on these skills during my postdoctoral work at the Krantz Family Center for Cancer Research at Massachusetts General Hospital.

I currently work at Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research, where I contribute to the Sherlock-Lung Study, a research initiative investigating the causes of lung cancer in never-smokers. My research sits at the intersection of computational biology and cancer genomics. I'm especially interested in deciphering the mutational processes that shape cancer genomes.