Ruchi Gupta

I grew up in Houston and went to Rice University, where I graduated with a B.A. in Chemistry. My interest in research started in a lab at McGovern Medical School where I studied the effects of modified NSAIDs to inhibit the proliferation and metastasis of pancreatic cancer. At Rice, I also worked in a chemical biology lab to develop a novel antibody conjugation technique called pClick to improve the way we deliver cancer immunotherapeutics. My senior honor thesis was on using pClick to genetically incorporate aspartic acid sequences into Herceptin antibodies for selective bone cancer therapy delivery.

I'm currently interested in improving immunotherapy responses for aggressive cancers by studying resistance mechanisms and identifying novel biomarkers. I am a PhD student in the Braun Lab, where I am working on patient-derived tumor models to study immunotherapy respones renal cell carcinoma. Outside of medicine, I love to draw and paint, listen to R&B music, and tend to my growing plant collection.