Joseph Cesare

Professional Background

A Kentucky native, I was born in Louisville and raised in rural New Hope with my 7 siblings, parents, and grandmother. I owe much of my education and opportunities to the community around me where the adage "it takes a village to raise a child" certainly applied. Inspired by the challenging diseases people in my family and community encountered, I resolved to pursue an educational path that could combine medicine and research to investigate how we can better understand, prevent, and treat disease.

I attended the University of Pennsylvania where I majored in Biology with a concentration in Molecular Biology, minored in Chemistry, and received a certificate in the Spanish Language. During my time as an undergraduate, I was mentored by Dr. Chang Gyu Hahn M.D., Ph.D. and Dr. Karin Borgmann-Winter M.D. as a work-study research assistant in the Department of Psychiatry at the Perelman School of Medicine. There I studied NMDA receptor signaling and signal transduction pathways in the postsynaptic density of animal models and post-mortem brain tissue from patients to understand the role it plays in schizophrenia. I was awarded summer funding for my work through the University of Pennsylvania's Career Services and the CSURE (CONTE Center Summer Research Experience) Program.

After graduation, I joined the Quantitative Proteomics Resource Core and laboratory of Dr. Benjamin A. Garcia Ph.D. in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at the Perelman School of Medicine. I led projects to develop new methods for proteomic analysis with specific applications in epigenetics and chromatin biology. Through many collaborations, my work contributed to our understanding of cancer, SARS-CoV-2, heart disease, developmental biology, chromatin biology and therapeutics such as neoantigen vaccines., I also volunteered for Big Brothers & Big Sisters of Philadelphia as well as Puentes de Salud, a clinic devoted to serving the LatinX population in Philadelphia.

I hope to continue to study chromatin biology and its role in transcriptional regulation of biological systems. Taking my previous experiences and future training, I hope this perspective will provide the foundation for a career conducting translational research.

I tell people you can take the boy out of Kentucky, but you cannot take the Kentucky out of the boy. Outside of my studies and research, I enjoy being outdoors including mountaineering, hiking, backpacking, floating a river on a canoe, boating, white water rafting, or playing a host of sports, especially basketball. I occasionally play video games and have tried to teach myself to play the piano and paint. I love to travel, but when I cannot afford that, I enjoy meeting up with friends to discuss philosophy, literature, or politics.

Mentor: Mike Washburn / Jerry Workman, Cancer Biology