W. Ruprecht Wiedemeyer, PhD

Dr. W. Ruprecht Wiedemeyer is a Research Scientist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He joined the faculty of Cedars-Sinai’s Women’s Cancer Program in late 2009 and is a member of the Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Center. In 2010, he was also appointed Assistant Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Dr. Wiedemeyer received his undergraduate training in Germany and holds a doctorate degree in molecular cancer genetics. As a graduate student in Manfred Schwab’s laboratory at the German Cancer Research Center, he worked on the transcription factor N-Myc and cell death genes in the pediatric cancer, neuroblastoma. Towards the end of his Ph.D., Dr. Wiedemeyer received a Klaus Tschira stipend to pursue postgraduate studies in bioinformatics at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany. Upon completion of this training, he joined Lynda Chin’s lab at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Harvard Medical School in Boston. As a postdoc in Dr. Chin’s group, he combined array-based profiling techniques, bioinformatics and biochemistry to characterize the genomes of malignant brain tumors (glioblastomas). In addition, Dr. Wiedemeyer took part in The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) pilot project. Studying different types of cancer, the focus of his work has been on the molecular pathways that are recurrently altered across various forms of cancer. Of particular interest are genetic events that can predict the response of a tumor to chemotherapeutic agents. In his current project, Dr. Wiedemeyer will investigate the genetic changes that enable human ovarian cancers to become resistant to chemotherapeutic agents targeting specific cancer-relevant pathways.