As it did for many of its members, the national champion GHHS Science Olympiad teams of 1993 and 1994 helped Jonathan Irish discover an affinity for science that grew into a career.
Now an Assistant Professor of Cancer Biology at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and a co-founder of Cytobank, Inc., a platform for scientific “big data” analysis, Dr. Irish graduated from the University of Michigan in 1998 with degrees in Chemistry, Biochemistry, and Honors Biology. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in Cancer Biology from Stanford University in 2004 and worked there as a postdoctoral Fellow and Instructor through 2011. His research has revealed the basic workings of the immune system and identified changes in the activity of individual cells that lead to therapy resistance in leukemia, lymphoma, melanoma, and brain tumors. He has studied and taught around the world and authored numerous publications. At Vanderbilt, he heads a research team dedicated to using single cell biology and innovative computational tools to identify safe and effective therapies tailored to the biology of each patient’s disease.
