ASCI / Emerging-Generation Awards, 2023

Annie Hsieh, MD, PhD is a physician-scientist in the field of Neuro-Oncology and is currently a Neuro-Oncology fellow at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Dana Farber Cancer Center. She obtained her MD from the Tzu Chi University in Taiwan and her PhD in Pathobiology from Johns Hopkins University under the mentorship of Dr. Chi V. Dang. During her PhD, Dr. Hsieh co-discovered that the MYC oncogene could disrupt the circadian molecular clock, contributing to aberrant metabolism and cell growth, which was published in Cell Metabolism. Her work opened the field of oncogenic-regulation of molecular clock and was highlighted in top journals including Nature Review of Cancer and Molecular Cell. She also initiated a collaboration with neuroscientist Dr. Amita Sehgal that led to her discovery that both upregulation and downregulation of Drosophila Myc affect circadian behavior in fruit flies which was published in Cell Report. Subsequently, she completed her Neurology residency at Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia, where she organized the first Neuro-Oncology tumor board.

During her Neuro-Oncology fellowship, in addition to taking care of brain tumor patients, Dr. Hsieh is conducting her post-doctoral research in the laboratories of Drs. Bernardo Sabatini and Marcia Haigis at the Harvard Medical School with support from the National Cancer Institute K12 program. Her research focuses on utilizing unbiased CRISPR screen to identify novel metabolic regulators for glioma growth and investigating the metabolic regulations at the neuron-glioma synapses. Dr. Hsieh’s goal is to have her own laboratory in the future to investigate how glioma takes advantage of the brain microenvironment and hijacks the metabolic pathways originally wired to produce neurotransmitters at the synapse.