Thales Nepomuceno, PhD

Thales Nepomuceno, PhD

Dr. Thales Nepomuceno obtained his B.Sc. degree in biology at the Federal Institute of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) in 2014. He also holds an M.Sc. (2016) and a Ph.D. (2020) degree in Oncology from the Brazilian National Cancer Institute. Throughout his education, he focused his attention on BRCA1, with a particular interest in the mechanisms of DNA damage repair. His work described CDK9, a new BRCA1 interacting protein, as a player in recruiting BRCA1 to DNA damaged sites. CDK9-mediated BRCA1 recruitment is necessary for promoting genome integrity through homologous recombination repair. He also worked on the functional characterization of BRCA1 variants of uncertain significance. He focused on assessing the impact of missense and small in-frame indels at the C-terminal portion of BRCA1. In 2018, during his Ph.D. training, he worked for nine months as a Fulbright Scholar at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida. After completing his Ph.D., he accepted a post-doctoral fellowship at Moffitt in Dr. Alvaro Monteiro’s laboratory. He has been working on ovarian cancer-related projects focused on developing strategies to increase the spectrum of patients that can benefit from PARPi targeted therapy.