Denada Dibra, PhD joined the Department of Microbiology and Immunology as an Assistant Professor on March 24th, 2025. She received his PhD. from Louisiana State University School of Veterinary Medicine. She completed her first postdoctoral fellowship at MD Anderson Cancer Center in the laboratory of Dr. Shulin Li, where she investigated the role of IL-27 in liver disease and cancer. She then undertook a second fellowship with Dr. Guillermina Lozano, focusing on developing advanced in vivo spontaneous mouse models that better recapitulate tumor-initiating mutations, disease progression, and immune dependencies. During this period, she discovered that tumor-initiating factors, such as mutant p53, protect cancer cells in vivo from undergoing ferroptotic cell death. In her independent research program, she focuses on liver and breast cancer, aiming to define how tumor-initiating mutations shape tumor dependencies and drive mechanisms of immunotherapy resistance. She approaches these questions using genetic engineering tools, sophisticated in vivo and spontaneous mouse models, and state-of-the-art single-cell technologies. Her work has been published in leading journals, including Science Advances, Hepatology, PNAS, Cancer Research, Clinical Cancer Research, and the Journal of Immunology