ASCI / Emerging-Generation Awards, 2023
The Emerging Generation Awards (E-Gen Awards) recognize post-MD, pre-faculty appointment physician-scientists who are meaningfully engaged in immersive research.
About the awardee
Johannes C. Melms, MD, was born and raised in Tübingen, Germany. He received his medical degree and a research doctoral degree in Translational Medicine from Technische Universität München. During medical school he was supported by the German Academic Scholarship foundation, which enabled additional research training and international exchange with academic institutions in the United States. In 2017, Dr. Melms joined a multi-institutional effort led by Dr. Benjamin Izar at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute to study cancer immune evasion in melanoma. In 2019 he moved to Columbia University as a founding member and postdoctoral fellow in the Izar laboratory. His research aims to understand clinically relevant molecular disease mechanisms by studying cancer using two complimentary approaches: (1) Advanced multi-modal single-cell sequencing of real-life clinical tissue samples, and (2) pooled perturbation of patient-derived model systems to inform gene function and ultimately identify actionable targets. His postdoctoral work focuses on key clinical issues of melanoma care: Immune-evasion (Nature genetics, 2020), targeted therapy-resistance (Cancer Research, 2020), and brain metastases (Cell, 2022). In addition, he implemented and systematically improved tissue profiling protocols of clinical specimens for single-cell research (Nature genetics, 2022) and led a team of scientists to build a high-resolution cell atlas of the lung tissue response to COVID-19 (Nature, 2021a and 2021b).