About Us

As a predoctoral student supervised by Dr. William Robinson, my research focused on the characterization of immune cell dysregulation in autoimmune disease using high throughput technologies. In this setting, I developed experience in bioinformatic analysis of high dimensional data which I used to identify several candidate proteins involved in autoimmune pathogenesis and subsequently validated and tested via analysis of human samples and in vitro experiments. For my postdoctoral training, I will build on my previous experience in bioinformatic analysis and mechanistic in vitro studies to interrogate the role of vasculature in driving autoimmune pathogenesis.  

Research Interests:  Vikram Khedgikar is working in the field of skeletal biology research from his PhD training. Most recently, he worked as postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Lehoczky’s lab understanding a novel Lgr6 expressing osteoprogenitor population of cells and the function of these cells in the maintenance of long bones. During his postdoctoral studies, he developed a strong interest in osteoarthritis and joined Dr.Wei’s lab which is well established in immunology, stromal cell biology, and rheumatology. Vikram is interested in studying the role of stromal cells in inflammatory and fibrotic diseases, especially in osteoarthritis.

Kseniia's PhD research focused on cancer biology, specifically looking at how dying tumor cells contribute to chemoresistance in nearby cells. In her recent postdoctoral role, she explored the role of tumor stroma and its impact on chemotherapy resistance, investigating lasting changes in stromal components even after tumors were removed. During her postdoctoral studies, she became deeply interested in understanding the origin of disease-associated fibroblasts, and their role in disease development. Currently, her research centers on studying biological systems at the single-cell and spatial levels, with a focus on autoimmune disease pathogenesis and the involvement of fibroblasts in these conditions. 

Dually trained in both rheumatology and dermatology, Rochelle is a physician-scientist with a particular interest in dermatomyositis and psoriatic arthritis whose goal is to utilize the skin as a window into internal organ involvement and a potential modifier of systemic autoimmune disease outcomes through integrative multi-omics analyses. At NYU, she underwent rheumatology fellowship training, obtained a master’s in Clinical Investigation with a focus on Translational Studies from the Clinical and Translational Science Institute, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in skin inflammation and psoriatic disease under Dr. Shruti Naik and Dr. Jose Scher. She first arrived at the Brigham as a dermatology-rheumatology fellow under Dr. Ruth Ann Vleugels in 2023. She is a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and has clinical and research appointments in both the Department of Dermatology and the Division of Rheumatology, Inflammation, and Immunity. After enjoying many years in New York City, she is thrilled to be laying down roots in Boston and joining the Wei Lab 

 Miles is a postbaccalaureate computational biologist interested in developing methods to analyze single-cell and spatial multi-omics data. He graduated from NYU with a degree in biology in 2022, where he had the opportunity to complete his undergraduate thesis in Dr. Neville Sanjana's Lab at the New York Genome Center. There, he focused on analyzing long-read nanopore sequencing data to gain insights into the epigenetic patterns associated with breast cancer metastasis.
Since graduation, Miles has been working with the single-cell core at Brigham and Women's Hospital, where he has been actively involved in the generation and analysis of single-cell data. His efforts are currently guided by the joint mentorship of Dr. Kevin Wei and Dr. Ilya Korsunsky, and together, they are dedicated to leveraging cutting edge single-cell and spatial multi-omic assays to deconstruct the cellular basis of complex diseases.