Soumya Korrapati, Ph.D.

Dr. Korrapati holds a Ph.D. in Genetics from Michigan State University. Her career involved studying and understanding the genetics of human hearing loss. She based her thesis on how mutations in cytoplasmic gamma actin can cause hearing loss. During this time, she became fascinated that birds, but not mammals, regenerate inner ear hair cells which are specialized structures involved in hearing. She pursued this interest and studied various signaling pathways involved in hair cell regeneration in her post-doctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University. Following her post-doctoral studies, Dr. Korrapati moved to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) where she generated mouse models of human hearing loss, primarily to discover therapeutic interventions for Meniere's disease. In 2018, She transitioned from NIDCD to the National Cancer Institute (NCI) with the idea of using her experience in human genetics, cell biology, and confocal microscopy in cancer immunotherapy. Dr. Korrapati was attracted to the lab of Dr. Christian Hinrichs, where she applied these skills to study tumor microenvironments and immune cell infiltration in HPV-positive tumors. In 2021, she was appointed to the Staff Scientist position for the Dr. Christina Annunziata lab where her focus is to find adoptive cell therapies for recurrent and chemo-resistant ovarian cancer. Today, she is particularly interested in tumor microenvironment-immune cell interplay and wants to harness emerging technologies to augment immunotherapy treatment options in ovarian cancer.