Cecily Claire Ritch

Cecily (Claire) Ritch is a first year MD-PhD student with an interest in cancer immunology from Eustis, Florida. In 2018, Claire graduated from Georgia Institute of Technology with a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering and minor in Chemistry. At Georgia Tech, she first fell in love with cancer research where she worked under Dr. Mostafa El-Sayed and Dr. Balakrishna Pai.

After graduation, she ventured to the northeast where she became dually affiliated with Sandro Santagata’s Lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Peter Sorger’s Laboratory Systems of Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School. Claire’s primary research focus was on using tissue-based cyclic immunofluorescence (t-CyCIF) and genetically engineered mouse models (GEMMs) to better characterize the spatial features of the tumor microenvironment (TME).

Using this platform, she was able to create high dimensional spatial maps of the TME allowing her to explore both cell-cell and immune network interactions using neighborhood analysis techniques. Pairing CyCIF with tractable mouse models has enabled her to understand how genetic perturbations and novel therapies alter the immune response in a controlled manner and elucidate the mechanisms by which tumors evade immune surveillance. She has been able to translate what she has found within these mouse models directly to clinical trial samples. Claire is also proficient in Python, MATLAB, R, and Bash.

In her free time, she loves to bake, play the guitar, and go to concerts.