CONGRATULATIONS to our Staff Scientist, Dr. Meghali Goswami, for winning first place abstract and giving a lightning talk at the CHARM symposium, the 4th Annual Cell and Gene Therapy Symposium in the Mid-Atlantic Region! 🏆

We are excited to share our preprint, “TAPESTRY: an interactive resource for exploring tumor-enriched splice junctions in pediatric brain tumors,” now on arXiv! This work was spearheaded by Dr. Patricia Sullivan, with underlying data generated by Dr. Ryan Corbett and infrastructure support by Dr. Chao Di.

What a day at the GW Bioinformatics Symposium! 🎉

Dr. Rokita has started volunteering as a postdoctoral mentor through the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) mentoring program! As a former CHOP postdoc herself, she is excited to give back by supporting the next generation of researchers at the institution where she spent nearly a decade of her career.

We are excited to share OpenPedCanExpress, a new web tool for exploring gene expression across pediatric tumors and normal tissue controls! Search any gene and instantly compare its expression in pediatric brain tumors against normal brain tissue, all in your browser with no code required.

Dr. Rokita has joined the Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation (PBTF) Technology Advisory Network (TAN)!

On this last day of Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, I’m remembering my little cousin, John Matthew Dean. John Matthew was born on November 21, 1993, and passed away in August of 1998 after a battle with a malignant brain tumor. He was four years old.

So proud of Dr. Ryan Corbett and Dr. Meg Goswami, who represented the Rokita Lab at the 2026 American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Pediatric Cancer Conference! 🎉

We are excited to welcome Dylan Mach, a second-year undergraduate student at The George Washington University, to the Rokita Lab 🎉. Dylan is majoring in Biology and minoring in Statistics, and is part of GWU’s Seven-Year BA/MD program.

So grateful for 1.5 days of dedicated Rokita Lab time this week with our amazing scientist team — Dr. Ryan Corbett, Dr. Patricia Sullivan, Dr. Meg Goswami, and Dr. Chao Di.

Congratulations to Deborah Torrico-Pardo on wrapping up a successful summer internship in the Rokita Lab, mentored by Dr. Meg Goswami!

It was great to be back at Children’s National Hospital for the annual Center for Cancer and Immunology Research (CCIR) Retreat!

While part of the team was on the other side of the world at ISPNO, Bailey, Rehman, Alex, and Aylar spent a day and a half at a focused Bioinformatics Operations retreat, dedicated entirely to engineering and automation.

The Rokita Lab traveled to Sydney this week for the International Symposium on Pediatric Neuro-Oncology (ISPNO), where we shared our latest work with the global pediatric neuro-oncology community.

We are excited to welcome high school summer student, Deborah Torrico-Pardo, to the Rokita Lab at Children’s National Hospital (CNH) 🎉. Deborah was selected through the prestigious METEOR Summer Program at Children’s National Hospital and will work on preclinical validation of a tumor-enriched splice event in pediatric brain tumors.

Congratulations to Dr. Kaylyn Clark on being selected for the TEAMS training program.

Proud to see Jacob White, Dr. Kaylyn Clark, and Dr. Meg Goswami represent the Rokita and Gilbert Labs at this year’s George Washington University Cancer Center retreat!

Congratulations to Dr. Patricia Sullivan on being awarded a prestigious Young Investigator Grant from Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation (ALSF)!

Congratulations to Jacob White for being awarded a summer fellowship from St. Baldrick’s Foundation! Jacob’s project “Association of genetic ancestry with pediatric CNS tumor splicing” will support the lab’s pediatric brain tumor research by identifying genetic determinants of alternative splicing and their contributions to disease.

We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Rehman Qureshi as Assistant Director of the Brain Tumor Institute Bioinformatics Core at Children’s National Hospital (CNH) 🎉.

Congratulations to Children’s National Hospital on another outstanding Research, Education, and Innovation (REI) week!

Congratulations to Vinay Gujjula for being awarded a Pediatric Oncology Student Training (POST) Award from Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation (ALSF). Vinay’s project “Investigating the association of genetic ancestry with pathogenic variation in pediatric patients with brain tumors” will support the lab’s germline variant analysis and broader pediatric brain tumor research through ancestry-informed computational analyses of large pediatric cancer datasets.

We are excited to share the publication of our latest study, “Alternative splicing in pediatric central nervous system tumors highlights oncofetal candidate CLK1 exon 4,” now published in Neuro-Oncology Pediatrics. Led by co-first authors Dr. Ammar Naqvi and Dr. Patricia Sullivan, this work represents years of collaborative effort across institutions and builds on our ongoing mission to understand the molecular programs that shape pediatric brain tumors.

We are thrilled to welcome Bailey Farrow to Children’s National Hospital (CNH) as our new Senior Bioinformatics Program and Operations Manager for the Brain Tumor Institute (BTI) Bioinformatics Core! 🎉

We are excited to welcome masters student, Jacob White, to the Rokita Lab at Children’s National Hospital (CNH) 🎉. Jacob will begin his research by studying both mechanisms of RNA splicing in pediatric brain tumors and identifying tractable splice-derived therapeutic targets.

We are excited to welcome masters student, Vinay Gujjula, to the Rokita Lab at Children’s National Hospital (CNH) 🎉. Vinay will begin his research by investigating the inheritance of pathogenic or likely pathogenic germline variants in pediatric brain tumors.

We’re thrilled to share the publication of our latest study, “Germline pathogenic variation impacts somatic alterations and patient outcomes in pediatric central nervous system tumors,” now out in Nature Communications. Led by Dr. Ryan Corbett in the Rokita Lab, this work represents a comprehensive multi-omic analysis of germline and somatic data from 830 pediatric brain tumor patients in the #PBTA — truly a tour de force by the team.

We are excited to welcome Dr. Meghali (Meg) Goswami as a Staff Scientist in the Rokita Lab at Children’s National Hospital (CNH) 🎉. Meg joins us from the National Cancer Institute, where she became a leading expert in tumor immunology, translational research, and biomarker discovery for immuno-oncology therapies.

We are excited to welcome Dr. Shang-Yang (Sam) Chen as a Bioinformatics Scientist in the Brain Tumor Institute Bioinformatics Core at Children’s National Hospital (CNH) 🎉.

Grateful and proud of Ryan Corbett and Dr. Patricia Sullivan for attending the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Pediatric Cancer Conference on behalf of the Rokita Lab, in our very first year as a lab!

At this year’s Center for Cancer and Immunology Research (CCIR) Retreat, Dr. Rokita gave a talk, entitled, “From Foundation to Future: The First Year of the BTI Bioinformatics Core.”

We are thrilled to announce that Dr. Ryan Corbett has been selected as the 2025 NextGen Awardee by the Children’s Cancer Foundation for his grant entitled, “Identification and functional targeting of alternative splice site usage in pediatric high-grade gliomas”.

We are excited to welcome Akhil Chada to the Rokita Lab at Children’s National Hospital (CNH) 🎉. Akhil joins us as a summer student and rising high school senior at James Madison High School in Fairfax County, Virginia. He brings expertise in several coding languages (Python, C++, R, and Java) and advanced mathematics.

We are excited to announce that our large, collaborative work on the Open Pediatric Cancer (OpenPedCan) Project has been accepted in GigaScience! We are very grateful for the many researchers, clinicians, engineers, bioinformaticians, and investigators who have contributed to this work – a true team effort! Read the preprint here.

We were thrilled to contribute to the recently accepted manuscript, “NRCAM variant defined by microexon skipping is an essential, antigenically distinct, and targetable surface proteoform in high-grade gliomas”, led by the lab of collaborator Dr. Andrei Thomas-Tikhonenko. In this project, we identified a tumor-specific exon inclusion event in the NRCAM gene as a new therapeutic target. Read the preprint here.

We are thrilled to announce Aylar Babaei as a Bioinformatics Scientist in the BTI Bioinformatics Core at Children’s National Hospital (CNH) 🎉. Aylar joins the Core after a productive year right here at CNH, where she contributed to multiple computational workflows, including Ribo-seq analysis, HLA typing, and MHC class I epitope prediction. She brings hands-on experience running large-scale pipelines on the high-performance computing (HPC) environment.

We are excited to welcome Dr. Chao Di as a Senior Bioinformatics Engineer and Scientist in the Rokita Lab and the Brain Tumor Institute Bioinformatics Core at Children’s National Hospital (CNH) 🎉.

We are excited to announce the arrival of Dr. Patricia Sullivan as a Bioinformatics Scientist in the Rokita Lab at Children’s National Hospital (CNH) 🎉. Patricia joins us from the Children’s Cancer Institute in Sydney, where she became a leading expert in splice-altering variation in pediatric cancer and rare disease genomics.

We are happy to announce our recruitment of Dr. Jessica Daggett as a Bioinformatics Scientist in the Brain Tumor Institute (BTI) Bioinformatics Core at Children’s National Hospital (CNH) 🎉.

We are happy to announce our recruitment of Dr. Kaylyn Clark as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Rokita Lab and Brain Tumor Institute (BTI) at Children’s National Hospital (CNH) 🎉.

We were thrilled to contribute to the recent publication, “Germline analysis of an international cohort of pediatric diffuse midline glioma patients”, led by collaborator Dr. Marion Mateos. In this project, we assessed pathogenicity of germline variants driving DIPG and DMG. Read more about it here.

We are happy to announce our recruitment of Dr. Bicna Song as a Bioinformatics Scientist in the Brain Tumor Institute (BTI) Bioinformatics Core at Children’s National Hospital (CNH) 🎉.

Dr. Rokita recently sat down with the press team at Children’s National to discuss her laboratory’s research, the development of the Brain Tumor Institute (BTI) Bioinformatics Core, and her collaborative and open science vision for the future. Read all about it here!

We are happy to announce the publication of “Germline pathogenic DROSHA variants are linked to pineoblastoma and Wilms tumor predisposition”, an international collaboration in which we describe a new tumor syndrome characterized by pathogenic germline DROSHA variants. Read more about it here.

We are thrilled to welcome Alex Sickler as a Bioinformatics Engineer in the Rokita Lab and Brain Tumor Institute (BTI) Bioinformatics Core at Children’s National Hospital (CNH) 🎉. Alex joins us after many productive years of bioinformatics engineering and infrastructure management work at GeneDx, the National Cancer Institute, and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP).

We were thrilled to be a part of the recent publication, “Imaging Clusters of Pediatric Low-Grade Glioma are Associated with Distinct Molecular Characteristics”, led by our collaborator Dr. Anahita Fathi Kazerooni. Read more about it here.

Our latest manuscript, “Germline pathogenic variation impacts somatic alterations and patient outcomes in pediatric CNS tumors”, work led by Dr. Ryan Corbett, is now preprinted on MedRxiv!

From Dr. Yael Mosse’s laboratory, we are happy to see the work of Dr. Smita Matkar, “Kinome reprogramming of G2/M kinases and repression of MYCN contribute to superior efficacy of lorlatinib in ALK-driven neuroblastoma”, published today. We were happy to have played a small role in this work! Read more about it here.

As a part of our splice-derived neoepitope identification research, we partnered with Dr. Andrei Thomas-Tikhonenko’s laboratory at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in which they validated an NRCAM splice event as a targetable immunotherapeutic target for pediatric high-grade gliomas. Please read more in “Neuronal cell adhesion molecule (NRCAM) variant defined by microexon skipping is an essential, antigenically distinct, and targetable proteoform in high-grade glioma” here.

We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Ryan Corbett as a Senior Bioinformatics Scientist in the Rokita Lab at Children’s National Hospital (CNH) 🎉. Ryan joins us after two years of outstanding work under the mentorship of Dr. Rokita at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP).

Our newest manuscript, “Genetic ancestry superpopulations show distinct prevalence and outcomes across pediatric central nervous system tumors from the PBTA and PNOC”, work led by Dr. Ryan Corbett, has been accepted in NeuroOncology!

We are thrilled to announce the opening of the Rokita Lab at Children’s National within the Brain Tumor Institute (BTI) and Center for Cancer and Immunology Research (CCIR)! Situated in a leading pediatric institution, our lab is equipped with cutting-edge technology and resources, fostering a collaborative environment for groundbreaking discoveries. We’re excited to accelerate our research and expand our efforts to improve outcomes for children with brain cancer.