Nalat Siwapornchai

Nalat Siwapornchai is a fifth-year PhD candidate and NSF Graduate Research Fellow in the Sinclair Lab at Harvard Medical School. She leads a project investigating what happens when cellular reprogramming is applied to cancer. Her work has shown that reprogramming can reduce tumor growth and shift colorectal cancer cells toward a more differentiated state. She uses single-cell genomics, chromatin profiling, drug screening, and mouse tumor models to understand how these responses arise and what they could mean for reprogramming-based therapies.

Before her doctoral training, Nalat studied biology and gerontology at UMass Boston. She then spent three years as a senior research technician at Tufts University, where she investigated age-related vulnerability to respiratory infections and contributed to several publications.

Outside the lab, Nalat served as Community Outreach Director for Harvard Science in the News, bringing research to audiences beyond academia. She was also a finalist in the Merck KGaA Innovation Cup and the Harvard-MIT Consulting Case Competition, working with interdisciplinary teams on challenges in therapeutic innovation and biotechnology strategy. She hopes to build a career connecting scientific discovery with better care for patients.