{"id":307274,"date":"2026-10-15T15:26:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-15T15:26:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/307274\/"},"modified":"2026-10-15T15:26:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-15T15:26:08","slug":"2-pitt-researchers-were-named-2026-stat-wunderkinds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/307274\/","title":{"rendered":"2 Pitt researchers were named 2026 STAT Wunderkinds"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two researchers with Pitt ties are among this year\u2019s STAT Wunderkinds<\/a>, an annual list of early career scientists and physicians selected by the health and medicine news outlet.<\/p>\n

Ragini Bhargava is a Hillman Postdoctoral Fellow for Innovative Cancer Research in Roderick O\u2019Sullivan\u2019s lab<\/a> at UPMC Hillman Cancer Center<\/a> and the School of Medicine. STAT credited her with \u201cinvestigating DNA repair and when it goes awry.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bhargava studies telomeres, the caps that protect the ends of chromosomes; in normal cells they get shorter with each division until the cell can no longer divide. Her work looks at how some cancer cells get around that limit by rebuilding those caps using tools the cell normally uses to repair damaged DNA.<\/p>\n

In June, Bhargava was first author on a study in the journal Nature<\/a> that examined how that rebuilding works. The researchers found that the ends of certain cancer cells contained copies of DNA that normally belongs in the middle of a chromosome.<\/p>\n

Neil Carleton<\/a> (MED \u201924G, \u201926) completed both his doctorate and his medical degree at Pitt, conducting research at UPMC Hillman Cancer Center with Professor Adrian Lee. He now studies why breast cancer behaves differently in older patients at Brigham and Women\u2019s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.<\/p>\n

In July, Carleton was first author on a study in the journal Nature Aging<\/a>, which found that breast tumors in older patients convert estrogen in the bloodstream into a different kind of estrogen, which fuels tumor growth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two researchers with Pitt ties are among this year\u2019s STAT Wunderkinds, an annual list of early career scientists…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":307275,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[73,75,74],"class_list":["post-307274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh-headlines","tag-pittsburgh-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307274"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307274\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/307275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=307274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=307274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}