Leadership team
Jill Bargonetti, Ph.D., Principal Investigator
Dr. Jill Bargonetti is the leader of the NY-RaMP program. She received her B.A. from SUNY Purchase, her M.S. and Ph.D. from New York University and her postgraduate training from Columbia University. While in the Purchase Dance Corps she performed works by Sarah Stackhouse and Paul Taylor and then went on to became a member of Dianne McIntyre’s Sounds in Motion from 1983-1985. In 1994 she became as an Assistant Professor at The City University of New York (CUNY) at Hunter College and The Graduate Center in the PhD Programs of Biology and Biochemistry and currently holds the title of Full Professor with tenure as the named chair Hesselbach Professor. Bargonetti was awarded the prestigious Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers by President Bill Clinton in 1997, and has run a consistently funded research laboratory since 1994 with research grants from the American Cancer Society, The Department of Defense, The National Science Foundation (NSF), The National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Breast Cancer Research Foundation (BCRF) and the METAvivor Foundation. She was a member of the National Cancer Policy Board from 2002 until 2005 (a board of the Institution of Medicine and National Research Council of the National Academies) and served as a NIH standing study section member for Tumor Cell Biology from 2012-2018. Dr. Bargonetti is currently on the scientific advisory board of METAvivor and serves on the National Cancer Institute Board of Scientific Counselors and reviews grants and manuscripts for numerous high impact organizations and journals (respectively).
Frida Kleiman, Ph.D., Co-Principal Investigator and Coordinator
Dr. Frida Kleiman is the co-leader and Coordinator of the NY-RaMP program. She received a PhD from the National University of Córdoba, Argentina and a postdoc at Columbia University. At Hunter College, she is a Professor in the Chemistry Department with extensive expertise in molecular basis of different cellular responses and their correlation with control of gene expression and cancer. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed top scientific journals. She has more than 25 years of experience in the field of Biomedicine and Molecular Biology. As a faculty from a minority serving institution and being a woman scientist originally from Latin America, she has been in a unique position to understand and provide support in the development of the careers not only of educationally disadvantaged undergraduate and graduate students but also of other junior and mid-career colleagues in our institutions. Thus, from 2015-2019, she directed the support of competitive research (SCORE) program at Hunter to increase the research competitiveness of faculty in under-resourced institutions. Three years ago, along with the Associate Director of the Office of Research Administration, she implemented and directed the Hunter College Path to Success Program (HCPSP), which uses a structured submission approach to provide hands-on mentoring throughout the grant submission process. The program has helped junior and mid-career faculty from across the disciplines, to successfully submit proposals to funding agencies, contributing to the development of Hunter College not only as top-notch educational institution but also as research institution.
Andrew Wolfe, Ph.D., Co-Principal Investigator
Dr. Andrew Wolfe is a co-leader of the NY-RaMP program, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Hunter College of the City University of New York, as Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmacology at Weill Cornell Medicine, and a Faculty Member in the Biochemistry Ph.D. Program and Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology Ph.D. Subprogram of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Biochemistry, Structural Biology, Cell Biology, Developmental Biology and Molecular Biology program at Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences doing cancer research in a laboratory at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He did postdoctoral work at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City and the University of California San Francisco. He completed the TRAIN-UP mentoring program at UCSF and the Mentor Training Workshop at the Comprehensive Regional Cancer Health Disparity Partnership’s 5th Annual Regional SPEECH Conference. Among other sources, Dr. Wolfe’s work has been funded by the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation, the National Cancer Institute, and the National Science Foundation. Dr. Wolfe’s laboratory at Hunter College in the Belfer Research Building researches the roles of oncogenes in driving cancer and resistance to therapy.
Joseph Skrivanek, Ph.D., Program Advisor
Dr. Joseph Skrivanek (SUNY Distinguished Service Professor) has devoted much of his 44-year career at Purchase and SUNY to broadening the STEM pipeline. He is the founder and director of the Baccalaureate and Beyond Community College Mentoring Program, which has been recognized for dramatically increasing the graduation rates of community college transfer students – particularly those pursuing STEM degrees – and has been replicated across the SUNY system under his direction. His other endeavors include partnering with community college organizations to bring STEM awareness and opportunities to minority K-12 students and developing science curricula and programs tailored specifically to the needs of community college and high school students. The programs that he has developed have attracted 12.3 million dollars in funding from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, PepsiCo Foundation, other corporations and private individuals. The community college program he founded has been recognized as a national model and has received a number of awards including the 2009 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Engineering, Mathematics Education Mentoring from President Obama and more recently the 2017 Inspirational Leaders in STEM Mentoring by Insight into Diversity in Higher Education magazine. In 2018, Dr. Skrivanek was named SUNY Distinguished Service Professor by then SUNY Chancellor, Dr. Kristina Johnson for his STEM education work across the SUNY System. In addition to his STEM activities, Dr. Skrivanek has also served as a reviewer for SUNY, the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools.
Allison Mayle, Ph.D., Assistant Director, DNA Learning Center NYC
Dr. Allison Mayle is a leader of the Research Readiness Bootcamp at the DNA Learning Center. She attended Michigan State University in large part because of the opportunity to do research starting as a freshman through the Professorial Assistantship program. She really enjoyed working in the lab, so she applied to Ph.D. programs and landed in the Molecular and Human Genetics Program at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. In grad school, she studied the processes that control stem cell self-renewal (making more stem cells to maintain a pool throughout life), and how these processes go awry in blood cancers. This was an exciting time as CRISPR was coming on to the scene as a new method for gene editing, so she started working with this technique. She then moved on to a postdoc position at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in the laboratory of Dr. Scott Lowe, where she continued to use CRISPR and study leukemia.
During her time in Houston, she volunteered for programs that introduced high school students to careers in science and medicine, and at the Health Museum in the DeBakey Cell Lab where she guided visitors through a variety of science experiments. It wasn’t until she was interviewing to be a Scientist-in-Residence in NYC that she realized she was more invested in making science accessible to non-scientists than she was in doing primary research myself.
When she came across the DNA Learning Center, she knew that this was a place where my firm belief that science is for everyone was shared. She found out that they wanted to develop a CRISPR course and would be hiring Educators and applied immediately! She is excited to spend more of her time teaching and sharing science with scholars.
Tristen Pasternak, NY-RaMP Project Assistant
Tristen Pasternak is originally from the greater Philadelphia area and moved to New York City in 2018 to attend Barnard College. While at Barnard, Tristen majored in English and Creative Writing, and upon graduation received the Howard M. Teichmann Writing Prize for her work in creative nonfiction, and the Peter S. Prescott Award for Prose Writing. Before coming to the NY-RaMP project at Hunter College, Tristen worked at the New York Botanical Garden. At NYBG Tristen digitized over 30,000 lichens in the Steere Herbarium collection, (with the oldest lichen she handled being from 1833), and wrote for the their online publication, The Hand Lens. Having participated in the 2023 Tuckermann Lichen Workshop in Gulf Shores, Alabama, Tristen enjoys attending local fungi and lichen walks with the New York Mycological Society. Tristen strives to increase the accessibility of science and she is thrilled to join NY-RaMP Leadership Team at Hunter College.
