Marissa Pioso is a graduate student in the Molecular and Medical Pharmacology program at UCLA. She received her undergraduate degree in Animal Sciences at The Ohio State University where she also worked under Drs. Sharyn Baker and Alex Sparreboom studying drug uptake and pharmacokinetics in breast cancer and acute myeloid leukemia (AML). During the following years she worked at Dana Farber Cancer Institute under Dr. Anthony Letai using functional precision medicine to understand apoptotic blocks in drug-resistant AML as well as determine effective interventions in this setting. She is currently studying the interplay between intrinsic oncogenic signaling and antitumor immunity in glioblastoma (GBM), with the ultimate goal of identifying combination therapies that enhance patient response and survival. Her project is a joint collaboration between Drs. David Nathanson and Robert Prins.