MPhil Student

Department of Radiology, University of Cambridge School of Clinical Medicine

Profile

Vinay is an MD/PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania currently pursuing his MPhil within the Department of Radiology as a Churchill Scholar.

Over the past two years of his clinical and research study in the United States, Vinay has been studying non-genetic heterogeneity in cancerous and benign tissues with the goal of moving toward an improved understanding of the mechanisms behind drug resistance in tumors and cell differentiation in the context of development. Prior to his medical training, Vinay Ayyappan received his undergraduate degree in bioengineering from Johns Hopkins University, where he worked as a research assistant in the Department of Radiology, where he used magnetic resonance spectroscopy to characterize the role of choline and creatine metabolism in breast cancer.

Vinay’s MPhil research, under the supervision of Prof Ferdia Gallagher, focuses on integrating multimodal data to characterize metabolic phenotypes in cancer, with the goal of identifying useful signatures for metabolic imaging.