Nami Matsuda, Ph.D.

My research interest is how cancer cells adapt to their microenvironment by switching their phenotypes and behaviors during metastatic cancer progression and therapy resistance. I was a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Prof. Gerhard Christofori at University of Basel, where I investigated the functional contribution of the process of epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) to breast cancer metastasis by developing and employing lineage tracing mouse models of metastatic breast cancer (Lüönd and Sugiyama et al., Dev. Cell, 2021). I was also a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Prof. Periklis Pantazis at D-BSSE, ETH Zurich in Basel, where I studied quantitative live-cell imaging strategies and techniques to investigate the behavior of hematopoietic stem cells in their niche (Sugiyama et al., Small, 2018). I have received my PhD from University of Helsinki, Finland, where I studied the molecular mechanisms regulating cancer cell invasion and metastasis under supervisions of Docent Kaisa Lehti and Prof. Jorma Keski-Oja (Sugiyama et al., PNAS, 2010; Sugiyama et al., Cancer Res, 2010; Cheng et al., Cell Host Microbe. 2011; Sugiyama et al., J. Cell Biol., 2013).