Lab Members

Anish Thomas, MD, is the Roswell Park Professor of Hematology and Oncology and founding director of the Metastasis Research and Therapeutics Initiative at Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University. He is a thoracic medical oncologist and physician-scientist focused on improving outcomes for patients with small-cell lung cancer (SCLC) and other aggressive cancers.

Thomas's laboratory integrates mechanistic studies, patient-derived models, molecular profiling and investigator-initiated clinical trials to understand tumor plasticity, metastatic progression and therapeutic resistance. His work has identified previously unrecognized therapeutic vulnerabilities and molecularly distinct states of SCLC and is increasingly focused on how metastatic organ microenvironments — particularly the liver — reprogram tumor and immune cells to drive treatment resistance. His overarching goal is to translate these discoveries into biomarker-guided therapeutic strategies.

Before joining Northwestern, Thomas was an NIH Lasker Clinical Research Scholar and tenured senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute. His work has been recognized with election to the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the NCI Director's Award for Clinical Science, the NCI Director's Award for Translational Science, the NIH Award of Merit and the Federal Technology Transfer Award.

Thomas is deeply committed to mentoring physician-scientists, translational researchers and laboratory scientists. His trainees have received several American Society of Clinical Oncology Young Investigator Awards, Career Development Awards, NIH Fellows Awards for Research Excellence, the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer Early Career Award, the NIH Physician-Scientist Early Investigator Award, the Lasker Clinical Research Scholar Award and the NCI Pathway to Independence Award for Outstanding Early Stage Postdoctoral Researchers (K99/R00). He received the 2022 NCI Director's Outstanding Mentor Award and the 2024 NIH Postbac Distinguished Mentor of the Year Award.

Abhinav Joshi, PhD, began his scientific career as a Research Associate at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, where he later earned his Ph.D. in Molecular Biosciences under the mentorship of Prof. Didier Picard. His doctoral work focused on the molecular chaperone TRAP1, a mitochondrial HSP90 paralog that sits at the interface of mitochondrial proteostasis, metabolic regulation, and cancer cell stress adaptation.

Before joining Northwestern, he worked at the National Cancer Institute, NIH with Len Neckers, PhD, where he studied mitochondrial metabolism and molecular chaperones as regulators of cancer cell adaptation and therapeutic response. During this time, he began collaborating with the Thomas Lab at NIH on metabolic adaptation and therapeutic vulnerabilities in SCLC.

At the Thomas Lab, Joshi studies metabolic adaptation, metastatic organotropism, tumor-microenvironment interactions, protein-protein interaction networks, and therapeutic vulnerabilities in SCLC. His work integrates molecular and cellular biology with proteomic, metabolomic, biochemical, and functional approaches. Beyond his research, Joshi is committed to mentoring the next generation of scientists, having trained Ph.D., master’s, and postbaccalaureate students at the University of Geneva and the NIH.

Ajit Sharma, PhD, earned his doctorate in life sciences from the Tata Memorial Centre at the Homi Bhabha National Institute in Mumbai, India. His doctoral work focused on the relationship between histone modifications and DNA damage responses following irradiation, particularly cell-cycle–specific alterations.

From 2014 to 2020, Sharma completed postdoctoral training at the Cross Cancer Institute at the University of Alberta under the mentorship of Professor Michael Hendzel. There, he investigated molecular mechanisms of DNA repair and made key contributions to understanding the role of PARP1 in regulating DNA end resection during homologous recombination and the physical state of condensed chromatin.

Sharma joined the NCI in 2022 as a research fellow and was later promoted to staff scientist in 2024. His current research focuses on the molecular mechanisms driving small cell lung cancer metastasis, genomic instability, DNA damage response and repair, tumor–microenvironment interactions and cancer metabolism. He has expertise in patient-derived models, metastasis and functional studies of therapeutic vulnerabilities. In addition to his research, Sharma is committed to mentoring the next generation of scientists, including summer students, postbaccalaureate fellows and postdoctoral fellows.

Sarthak Sahoo, PhD, completed his graduate training in Bioengineering at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangaluru, where his work focused on understanding the principles that govern complex biological systems in health and disease. His research integrates mathematical modeling, multimodal and multi-omic analysis, large-scale dataset interpretation, and computational analysis of clinical samples.

His interests center on developing frameworks to understand how cellular processes are coordinated during cancer metastasis. As a postdoctoral fellow in the Thomas Lab, Sahoo contributes to studies of tumor-state transitions, metastatic progression, therapeutic resistance, and clinically relevant heterogeneity in SCLC.

Gaku Yamamoto, MD, PhD, is a physician-scientist and thoracic oncologist with training in respiratory medicine, clinical lung cancer research, and translational oncology. He trained at Hokkaido University and Hokkaido University Hospital and worked as a visiting researcher at the National Cancer Center Japan.

His research has focused on lung cancer therapeutics, biomarker-driven clinical studies, replication stress, genomic instability, and mechanisms of treatment resistance, including targeted therapy resistance in EGFR- and KRAS-mutant lung cancers. He has presented his work at AACR and received a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Research Fellowship for Young Scientists. In the Thomas Lab, Yamamoto studies SCLC metastatic organotropism.