![\"Yang](\"https:\/\/news.unchealthcare.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1159\/2025\/04\/Yang-Scholars-1024x470.png\")
<\/a>The UNC School of Medicine has named three outstanding researchers as recipients of the eighth annual Yang Family Biomedical Scholars Award!<\/p>\n
They are: Gaorav Gupta, MD, PhD, associate professor of Radiation Oncology and member of UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center; Misty Good, MD, MS, associate professor of Pediatrics and Chief of the Division of Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine; and Jason Stein, PhD, associate professor of Genetics and member of the UNC Neuroscience Center.<\/p>\n
Each faculty member will receive a generous grant to be used at their discretion for biomedical research projects at the UNC School of Medicine. The researchers are now members of the Yang Family Society of Biomedical Scholars, which will host its annual seminar to highlight their work later this summer. The awards were made possible through donations from Yuanqing Yang, Chairman and CEO of Lenovo, with additional financial support from Mr. To Hing Wu, an associate to Mr. Yang.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are extremely grateful for Mr. Yang and Mr. Wu\u2019s continued support of our School of Medicine\u2019s research mission,\u201d said Blossom Damania, PhD, Vice Dean for Research at the UNC School of Medicine. \u201cTheir generous support has catalyzed the research of our Yang Scholars, who are working at the forefront of the most pressing biomedical research questions.\u201d<\/p>\n
With the Yang Scholars program, the UNC School of Medicine has established a community of dedicated, promising young tenured faculty. The award recognizes faculty that have made significant scholarly contributions to their field while also receiving national recognition for their research.<\/p>\n
Dr. Gupta\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0research interest is to understand the interplay between genome integrity pathways and breast cancer initiation, progression, and response to therapy. He has made seminal contributions to the understanding of the genetic mechanisms that underlie tissue-specific metastasis of breast cancer. At UNC, Dr. Gupta has established a vigorous research laboratory that aims to understand how DNA repair programs are reconfigured during cancer pathogenesis. The underlying focus of his work is the recognition that our normal cells routinely suffer a large number of DNA mutations, and that we have evolved an impressive array of DNA-repair mechanisms to \u201cfix\u201d these mutations.<\/p>\n Dr. Gupta\u2019s laboratory also uncovered a mechanism by which DNA damage activates the innate immune system. His team demonstrated that this process involves direct collaboration between the canonical DNA repair protein Mre11 and the immune sensor cGAS, previously recognized for detecting viral DNA. As a physician-scientist, Dr. Gupta has successfully translated these mechanistic insights into novel therapeutic strategies for cancer patients.<\/p>\n Dr. Good\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0laboratory is focused on the cellular and molecular mechanisms involved in the pathogenesis of a devastating intestinal disease primarily affecting premature infants called necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC). The long-term goal of the Good Lab is to understand the signaling pathways regulating the uncontrolled immune response in NEC and how these responses can be prevented through dietary modifications or targeted intestinal epithelial therapies.\u00a0She uses a creative, multi-faceted approach in her research that combines pre-clinical animal studies, novel in vitro models, along with multi-omic analysis of patient samples.<\/p>\n In addition, Dr. Good has developed an innovative in vitro model of NEC, called \u201cNEC-on-a-Chip,\u201d using a microfluidic device, human neonatal intestinal enteroids, and the microbiome of infants with NEC as a pre-clinical model to test drugs on premature human intestine. In her translational research studies, she is actively working to identify a biomarker for NEC. To accomplish this, while Dr. Good was a junior faculty member, she founded and developed the infrastructure for the NEC Biorepository, which has grown into a ten-center collaborative effort incorporating biological samples and clinical data from premature infants across the country. Her basic and translational research utilizes a bench-to-bedside approach with multiple cutting-edge techniques.<\/p>\n Dr. Stein\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0research explores how variations in the genome change the structure and development of the brain, and in doing so, create risk for neuropsychiatric illness. This work identified the first highly significant and replicated common variants influencing brain structure. His lab also studies genetic control of human cortical development through the identification of genetic variants that influence the expression of nearby genes.<\/p>\n One of the recent cutting-edge developments in the Stein lab is the establishment of cortical organoids from induced pluripotent stem cells (IPSCs) harvested from blood samples from individuals with autism and those without. These organoids are used to understand the cellular and molecular mechanisms leading to brain overgrowth in individuals with autism. The Stein lab has also successfully moved into new fields of study, evidenced by the awarding of a new Alzheimer\u2019s disease U01 grant from NIA focused on modeling gene x environment interactions using the cortical organoid model.<\/p>\n Media contact:\u00a0<\/em>Brittany Phillips<\/em><\/a>, Communications Specialist, UNC Health | UNC School of Medicine<\/em><\/p>\n