Current Research Team
Dr. David Brooks
Senior Scientist/Professor
Dr. David Brooks is a Senior Scientist and the Scotiabank Chair in Inflammation Research in the Tumor Immunotherapy Program at the Princess Margaret Cancer Center (PMCC), and a Professor in the Department of Immunology, Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto. Before joining PMCC, Dr. Brooks was a tenured Associate Professor and led a laboratory at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) for seven years.
Dr. Brooks did his post-doctoral fellowship with Dr. Michael Oldstone at The Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California studying the immune response to persistent virus infection. Dr. Brooks earned his Ph.D. from UCLA under the mentorship of Dr. Jerome Zack, studying HIV latency and therapeutic strategies to reactivate the latent virus. Dr. Brooks earned his B.S. in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of Arizona. He was born and raised in Venice, California.
Dr. Wenxi Xu
Scientific Associate
Wenxi Xu is an experienced scientist with a Ph.D. in Microbiology and demonstrated records of studying pulmonary immunology. From 2014 to 2022, he worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto and Princess Margaret Cancer Center, focusing on anti-tuberculosis vaccines, pulmonary immunity, and mass cytometry. During the post-doctoral study in Dr. David Brooks' laboratory, he studied a new mouse model with chronic virus/tuberculosis coinfection and developed several therapeutic methods with antibodies and bone marrow dendritic cells to enhance pulmonary immunity. These results were published in Immunity in 2021. In early 2022, he joined Standard BioTools Inc. as a product development scientist and focused on the development of mass cytometry antibodies. Since November 2023, he rejoined Brooks Laboratory with a focus shifted to imaging mass cytometry technology and seeking a deep understanding of Type I interferon signalling in anti-virus and anti-tumour immunity.
Dr. Bruna Bertol
Postdoctoral Fellow
Dr. Bertol obtained her PhD in Immunology from Ribeirão Preto Medical School at University of São Paulo (Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brazil). Her doctoral thesis analyzed genetic, immunological, and therapeutic aspects of papillary thyroid carcinoma morbidity in a pre-clinical mouse model and human patients. She joined Dr. Brooks lab in the end of 2021 to continue working in the field of cancer immunology and immunotherapy.
Even though immune restorative therapies, such as chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) expressing T cells, have revolutionized cancer treatment, many patients still succumb to disease. Thus, there is a critical need to identify factors associated with either success or failure of these approaches and translate them into human therapies. By CRISPR/Cas9 technique coupled with a pre-clinical humanized mouse CAR T cell therapy system, Bruna’s current work aim to modulate interferon-regulating factor 2 (IRF2), a recently uncovered central regulator of CD8 T cell exhaustion, to make sub-optimal adoptive cell therapy highly effective at controlling human tumors.
Dr. Matthew Cormier
Postdoctoral Fellow
Dr. Cormier recieved his PhD at Queen’s University in the Department of Pathology and Molecular Medicine under the supervision of Dr. Lillicrap. His project involved an all-encompassing immunological investigation into anti-drug antibody responses that occur in some patients with hemophilia A. In 2023, he transitioned into cancer immunology under the supervision of Dr. Brooks at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre.
Matthew’s current work involves investigating the intra-tumoral dyanamics of interferon signaling. Using high-dimensional approaches in conjunction with spatial analyses, he will be assessing how interferon signaling and response to interferons shape anti-tumor immune responses.
Siran Liu
Ph.D. candidate
I received Bachelor of Medicine major in Basic Medical Sciences from Capital Medical University (Beijing, China). In my undergraduate program, I finished one-year internship as an intern medical student in Beijing Friendship Hospital. My undergraduate research focused on investigating the mechanism for Immunoglobulin Class Switch Recombination in B1 cells. Then, I went to Northwestern University (Evanston, IL) from where I finished my Master’s Program and obtained Master of Science in Biotechnology. During those two years, I conducted research focusing on investigating how long non-coding RNAs regulating Drosophila’s eye development by using imaging and quantitative methods.
I began my Ph.D. Program in Fundamental Immunology at the University of Toronto in 2021, joining Dr. Brooks lab at the Princess Margaret Cancer Center. I am currently studying the mechanisms leading to T cells exhaustion and dysfunction.
Melissa Liu
Ph.D candidate
Melissa completed her undergraduate degree at the University of California, Berkeley, where she majored in Molecular and Cell Biology with a focus in Immunology and Pathogenesis. During her undergraduate studies, Melissa participated in the research of hummingbird flight aerodynamics in Dr. Robert Dudley’s lab. She also worked in Dr. Gerard Marriott’s as a research assistant in two projects that aimed to develop light-sensitive ophthalmic drug delivery including anti-VEGF antibodies and Lifitegrast. Under Dr. Marriott’s supervision, Melissa completed her undergraduate honors thesis, which focuses on developing mechanoluminescent probes for artificial bones and joints.
Melissa joined the Brooks lab as a Ph.D. student in fundamental immunology in 2021. Currently, she is studying the mechanism and function of cytotoxic CD4 T cells in viral infection.
Dr. Diala Abd Rabbo
Senior Bioinformatician
Diala obtained her Ph.D. in Bioinformatics from Université de Montréal in 2017, under the supervision of Dr. Stephen Michnick. During her doctoral training, she studied the properties and hierarchical structures of protein-protein interaction networks in yeast. Subsequently, she pursued a post-doctoral fellowship with the Reimand group at OICR, Toronto. Here, her research was centered on understanding the impact of mutational processes on the gene-regulatory and chromatic architectural elements within the human cancer genome.
Since 2019, Diala joined the Brooks lab, serving as a senior bioinformatician. In this role, she specializes in analyzing and interpreting high-throughput single-cell data, including scRNA-Seq, scATAC-Seq, AB-Seq, and spatial transcriptomics. Her contributions extend to the integration of advanced bioinformatics tools, pipeline development, and fostering collaborative efforts with lab members to advance research projects.
Dr. Rene Quevedo
Senior Bioinformatician
Dr. Quevedo received his PhD in Medical Biophysics from the University of Toronto. His doctoral thesis focused on modelling the mechanistic and therapeutic roles that allele-specific copy number alterations have in cancer.
He joined Dr. Brooks lab in 2021 to apply his computational expertise and machine learning approaches to studying autoimmunity. Within the Brooks lab, he primarily focuses on assisting members of the lab to process and analyze their data, as well as working in collaborative efforts with other labs. He is involved in the development of standardized workflows, building novel algorithms, analysis and data-visualization of data from single-cell multi-omics (RNA, ATAC, VDJ), bulk RNA-Seq, CUT&RUN, ATAC-Seq, shotgun metagenomics and V3-V4 16S rRNA sequencing.
Rowena Rodrigo
Research Associate
Rowena received her M.Sc in pharmacology and drug development at the University of Waterloo School of Pharmacy. Her project explored the relationship between autophagy and acute myeloid leukemia (AML), whereby defects in autophagy lead to an altered mitochondrial phenotype which can be exploited with new unconventional chemotherapy agents.
Subsequent to a role in private-sector toxicology, Rowena joined the Brooks Lab as part of the Tumor Immunotherapy Program at PMCC in 2019 to perform immune profiling for clinical trials. Her current work tethers her foundation in immunometabolism with her fascination for new and revolutionary cancer treatments.
Delanie Finnigan
Undergraduate research student
Delanie is currently an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto completing a double major in Molecular Genetics and Microbiology and Health and Disease with a minor in Immunology. She has worked in labs studying topics ranging from neurology and gut microbiome to immunotherapy. During the academic year, she works in the Brooks lab and has worked on a project focused on developing a standardized type I interferon response capacity (IRC) control to enable prediction of patient response to PD-1 therapy. In summer 2022 with Dr. Harley Kornblum at UCLA, she studied germline PTEN mutations in patients with autism and macrocephaly. In summer 2023 with Dr. Elaine Hsiao at UCLA, she looked at neuronal activation in mouse brain during bacteria-modulated food choice.
