Principal Investigator

Daniel Faden, MD FACS

Assistant Professor, Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Harvard Medical School

Attending Surgeon, Mass Eye and Ear, Mass General Hospital

Associate Scientist, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

Daniel Faden M.D., F.A.C.S., is a head and neck surgical oncologist and scientist in the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at Harvard Medical School. After completing medical school he was a Howard Hughes Research Scholar in the National Human Genome Research Institute studying cancer genomics. He then completed residency training in Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at UCSF where he was embedded in the laboratory of HHMI Investigator Joe DeRisi studying viral oncogenesis. He completed three fellowships at the University of Pittsburgh in head and neck surgical oncology, in cranial base surgery, and a T32 research fellowship in the laboratory of Robert Ferris, MD PhD. In 2018 he returned to Boston where he is an attending surgeon in the division of head and neck surgical oncology at Mass Eye and Ear and Mass General Hospital and an associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. The Faden lab is a translational research laboratory focused on head and neck cancer biomarker discovery. The lab is currently funded by three NIH grants, as well as industry and foundation awards, to utilize tissue and blood-based approaches for studying head and neck cancer genomics with a focus on development of liquid biopsies for detecting, diagnosing, and monitoring HPV-associated cancers.

Lab Members

Daniel Ruiz

Postdoc Research Fellow

Daniel first joined the lab while a final year medical student at Universidad del Rosario, Bogotá, Colombia, studying biomarkers for immunotherapy response in head and neck cancer. After completing his year as a Research Scholar, he briefly returned home to graduate from medical school and has returned to Boston as a post-doc, continuing his work on multiplexed immunofluorescence and circulating tumor cells in head and neck cancer, in close collaboration with Dr. Shannon Stott at MGH. In his spare time he enjoys outdoor activities and spending time with family and friends. He plans to pursue a career in Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery.

Dipon Das, PhD

Research Scientist

Dipon received his PhD in cancer biology from KIIT University, India where he studied DNA damage/repair pathways. He completed post-doctoral training at Philips Institute for Oral Health Research, Virginia Commonwealth University, Virginia, USA. His postdoctoral training focused on identifying the host factors essential for Human Papillomavirus (HPV) replication in cervical and head & neck cancers and delineating their mechanism of action. Before joining the Faden Lab he worked as a Senior Research Associate 2 at the University of Miami, Florida, USA. In the Faden Lab, Dipon manages the lab and leads the development of novel approaches for detecting HPV in the blood.

Gjystina Lumaj

Clinical Research Coordinator

Gjystina received her bachelor’s degree in Neuroscience at Carnegie Mellon University and Master’s degree in Biomedical Science at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. She previously worked as a surgical assistant for an oral & maxillofacial surgery practice. In her spare time she enjoys painting and baking.

Qin Wang, PhD

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Qin received his bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University in China and completed his PhD in Bioengineering at the University of Washington. His PhD focused on developing diagnostic assays for infectious diseases, particularly HIV and COVID-19 in low-resource settings. Qin joined the Faden Lab as a postdoctoral research fellow, where he works on developing liquid biopsy assays for HPV-associated cancer and their use in HIV-positive populations. His long-term research interest is technology development to expand healthcare access in low-resource settings for global health. In his spare time, Qin enjoys tennis, running, being in the mountains as well as staying indoors with his cat.

Samuli Eldfors, PhD

Research Scientist

Samuli earned his PhD in Genetics from the University of Helsinki, focusing on mutations driving blood cancers. He worked as a bioinformatician at the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland, where he led the analysis of cancer mutations in patient samples. Before joining MEE, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center and Harvard Medical School, specializing in therapeutically targetable vulnerabilities in myeloid cancers. At the Faden Lab at MEE, he specializes in the computational analysis of NGS data from liquid biopsies of HPV-associated cancers. His research interests include developing computational approaches for analyzing liquid biopsy data, with a focus on cell-free RNA and DNA-based assays

Yana Al-Inaya

Research Scholar

Yana is a student at the School of Medicine at Uzhhorod National University, Ukraine. She is interested in skull base cancers. In the Faden Lab she works on HPV vaccination and the application of Systems Serology to understand the immune response to HPV. In her free time, she enjoys hiking and gardening.

Yifan Yang, MD

Postdoctoral Research Scholar

Yifan received her bachelor’s degree in clinical medicine at Capital Medical University in China and MD in Otorhinolaryngology, head and neck surgery, focusing on clinical and scientific research of head and neck cancer. She completed residency training at Beijing Tongren Hospital and works there as a head and neck cancer surgeon. Her research interests include non-invasive methods for early prediction of head and neck tumor incidence and progression. In her spare time she enjoys swimming, skiing, and hiking.