Aditya Mohan is a senior student at Johns Hopkins University and youth leader in STEM originally from Ottawa, Ontario. Aditya has always been keenly interested in science and the potential it holds to make a difference in the world. Over the years, Aditya has been involved in numerous research projects however has a keen emphasis on cancer and immunological research.

Aditya first began working in a research lab at the age of 15, studying the cellular interactions found in chronic diseases such as HIV. He began to research molecular immunology and developed a novel HIV treatment to stimulate the production of anti-viral CD8+ T Cells. This project won many national and regional awards including the prestigious Canadian Manning Innovation Award.

From this platform, Aditya was able to discover his greatest academic interest: cancer research. Aditya has leveraged his experience in virology to design cancer treatments ranging from oncolytic virology to tumor immunology. Aditya’s projects in oncolytic virology have involved bioengineering the common cold adenovirus virus to selectively identify and kill cancer cells. Since then, Aditya has used viruses as a gene delivery platform to create new immunotherapy designs. Aditya has worked with multiple world experts in the field of cancer immunotherapy on projects ranging from check-point inhibitors (recently published in Nature) and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell technology to arm the immune system to recognize and kill cancer cells.

Aditya has used this research experience to develop a passion for medical sciences. Aditya is now is now a pre-med student majoring in Molecular and Cellular Biology at Johns Hopkins and working at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in the Bloomberg Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy.