Ambika Jyoti Lall, MD

Dr. Christine Pratilas is a pediatric medical oncologist at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center and Associate Professor of Oncology, Pediatrics & Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She joined the Hopkins pediatric sarcoma team in 2014. Dr. Pratilas received her undergraduate degree in Biology from Drew University in New Jersey and her medical degree from UMDNJ - Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (now Rutgers University), where she also completed her internship and residency from 1999 to 2002. From 2002 to 2005 she was a fellow in hematology and oncology in the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) Department of Pediatrics, and in the Department of Pediatric Hematology and Oncology at New York Weill Cornell Medical Center. She was a postdoctoral research fellow in Dr. Neal Rosen’s Molecular Oncogenesis Laboratory at MSKCC. From 2006 to 2014 she was attending in Pediatric Oncology at MSKCC, specializing in developmental therapeutics & sarcoma. She has been the director of the pediatric sarcoma program at Hopkins since 2018. Dr. Pratilas focuses her research on cancer-associated pathways and signal transduction, which involves figuring out how a cell’s internal molecular pathways work, and how those pathways can be molecularly controlled. This knowledge is the basis for developing promising new molecularly targeted cancer therapies, which is the focus of Dr. Pratilas’s research. Among her important scientific contributions is advancing our understanding of how certain proteins that can be mutated in cancer, known as RAF kinases (specifically BRAF), affect a cancer cell’s behavior. The research in Dr. Pratilas' laboratory is focused on RAS signal transduction pathways, concentrating on pediatric sarcomas such as rhabdomyosarcoma and malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumors, in order to develop novel therapeutics for children with these tumors.

Dr. Jeffrey M. Dodd-o is an associate professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He has a secondary appointment in surgery. His area of clinical expertise is cardiac anesthesiology. Dr. Dodd-o received undergraduate degrees in general arts and sciences and Spanish from Pennsylvania State University. He earned his medical degree from the Medical College of Pennsylvania, followed by an internship in general surgery at Northeastern Ohio University’s Youngstown Hospital, and a Ph.D. in physiology from the University of North Texas. He then completed a residency in anesthesiology and performed a fellowship in critical care medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dr. Dodd-o joined the Johns Hopkins faculty in 1994. His research focuses on understanding the factors that contribute to ischemia and reperfusion injury of the lung and how ischemia and reperfusion contribute to lung dysfunction in the early post-cardiopulmonary bypass period. He is a diplomate of the American Society of Anesthesiologists.