ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2023
The Young Physician-Scientist Awards (YPSA) recognize physician-scientists who are early in their first faculty appointment and have made notable achievements in their research.
About the awardee
Sarah Elizabeth Johnstone, MD, PhD received her PhD in Genetics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2008 working with Dr. Richard Young. Subsequently, she went to medical school at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, completing her degree in 2012. During her MD, she pursued research with Dr. Steve Baylin at Johns Hopkins. She then completed her Anatomic Pathology and Gynecologic Pathology residency and fellowship at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Following this, her post-doctoral research was performed in Dr. Bradley Bernstein’s lab at Harvard Medical School. She published a groundbreaking study evaluating changes to the 3D genome structure that occur in tumors and probing how these functions are related to aging cells and suppress tumor growth. This work suggests new avenues to understand nuclear organization and how it functions in cancer development.
These accomplishments as a postdoctoral fellow reflect a long-standing interest in epigenetics. Dr. Johnstone has published all together 15 papers, 4 first author. She has presented her research to national audiences, including the 2020 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Epigenetics and Chromatin Meeting. She recently received a K08 grant from the National Cancer Institute to support her work and has received multiple awards for her research and scholarship, including an MGH Cancer Center Excellence Award (2019-2020). In 2021 she joined the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School as an Assistant Professor of Pathology. Her laboratory is focused on understanding the impact of epigenetic and topological alterations in cancer genomes.