Jayati Mondal graduated from Hunter College in May with a degree in Biological Sciences. Growing up in Bangladesh and seeing her father practice medicine as a cardiologist, she was drawn toward science at an early age. Though her father could no longer practice when the family moved to the United States, he continued to encourage her interest in biology. When her great-grandmother’s cancer metastasized to her brain in 2018, Jayati personally reached out to a neurooncologist, hoping to understand the diagnosis better.

As an undergraduate, Jayati joined the lab of Andrew L. Wolfe, PhD (Damon Runyon Fellow ’15-’18), where she explored the potential of peptide nucleic acids to target lung and colorectal cancer cells with KRAS mutations. She will now return to the Wolfe Lab as a SPARK Scholar and continue making meaningful contributions toward this research.