Clinical Fellow
Barrow Neurological Institute
Dr. Nasser Yaghi earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Molecular and Cell Biology with a minor in Psychology from Texas A&M University in 2010. During his undergraduate studies, he was selected two consecutive years for the Summer Honors Undergraduate Research Program at Harvard Medical School. In 2008 Dr. Yaghi worked with Dr. Yang Shi to perform a functional study of PHF8, a novel histone demethylase, and its epigenetic contributions; his work on this project was published in Nature. In 2009 at the Dana Faber Cancer Institute, he worked to identify novel tumor antigens from patients immunized with GVAX, a newly developed cancer vaccine.
He continued to build on his cancer immunology background in 2010 at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine where he spent one year using a specialized serum antibody-antigen screening technique called SEREX to further characterize the immune response in patients treated with the GVAX vaccine. He went on to start medical school at Baylor College of Medicine in 2011 where he graduated with the Medical Student Research Track distinction. During medical school he was awarded the prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute Medical Research Fellowship with a one-year grant to study the “Reversal of Glioma-mediated immune suppression using a nanovector delivery system of microRNA in vivo” under the mentorship of Dr. Amy Heimberger at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
In 2016 Dr. Yaghi began training in Neurological Surgery and is currently a resident at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, Oregon. He is completing a research year at the National Institutes of Health under the mentorship of Dr. Mark Gilbert in the Neuro-Oncology Branch at the NCI with the focus of further understanding and characterizing the immune suppressive effects of dexamethasone. He is also participating in a clinical trial, NCT04817254, examining the peripheral blood immunologic response in glioblastoma and gliosarcoma patients treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors. He aims to further sub-specialize in Neurosurgical Oncology and has planned to complete a Neurosurgical Oncology Fellowship starting in 2023 with Dr. Nader Sanai at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona.