ASCI / Emerging-Generation Awards, 2026

Sam Kleeman, MD, PhD, is a postdoctoral research fellow at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in NY. Born in London, UK, he received his undergraduate degree from the University of Cambridge and his MD from the University of Oxford, UK. Following medical school, he completed a two-year internal medicine internship in the National Health Service, UK, before beginning his PhD studies at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 2020 under the mentorship of Drs. Tobias Janowitz and Hiro Furukawa.

Dr. Kleeman's research focuses on the intersection between anti-cancer immunity and autoimmunity, particularly paraneoplastic syndromes where tumors trigger pathologic immune responses against distant organs. His doctoral work investigated the mechanisms driving anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis, a paraneoplastic neurological syndrome associated with seizures and psychosis. He characterized the origin and clonal evolution of NMDAR-reactive B cells in vivo and used cryo-electron microscopy to reveal how mouse-derived anti-NMDAR antibodies allosterically modulate receptor structure and function. This work, now accepted for publication in Nature, established a causal link between intratumoral antigen expression, antibody maturation from germline precursors, and neurotoxicity.

Since 2024, Dr. Kleeman has been supported by a fellowship from the Terri Brodeur Breast Cancer Foundation. He successfully defended his PhD thesis in early 2025 and is now applying the molecular techniques established in his thesis to study NMDAR expression and isolate anti-NMDAR B-cell clones in prospectively collected ovarian teratoma and triple-negative breast cancer samples. His long-term ambition is to train as a hematologist-oncologist and establish an independent research program integrating prospective clinical studies, tumor immunology, and structural biology to elucidate targetable mechanisms underlying cancer-associated autoimmunity.