Dr. Karuna Ganesh is a physician-scientist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, in the Molecular Pharmacology Program and Gastrointestinal Oncology Service, and Director of Metastasis Research, Center for Colorectal Cancer.  Originally from India, she received her BA (Honours) in Biochemistry and MD/PhD in 2010 from the University of Cambridge, UK. She completed her Ph.D. in Molecular Biology at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology under Professor Michael Neuberger. Her doctoral work focused on the antibody gene diversification enzyme AID, where she identified a novel interacting protein, CTNNBL1, and provided mechanistic and structural insights into AID-driven genomic instability. Following her clinical training as a resident in Internal Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Dr. Ganesh completed a fellowship in Medical Oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), completing postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Dr. Joan Massague. She pioneered a human-centric research platform to study metastasis and cancer plasticity, establishing a large-scale biobank of patient-derived organoids (PDOs) from matched normal, primary, and metastatic colorectal cancer tissues.  Her work demonstrated that organoid responses to chemoradiation correlated with clinical outcomes. She also discovered L1CAM as a crucial marker for metastasis-initiating cells (MICs), revealing that cancer co-opts a physiological wound-healing program to become metastatic and chemoresistant. Her independent lab in the Sloan Kettering Institute, launched in Fall 2019, focuses on the mechanisms of cellular plasticity in metastasis and therapy resistance. Her work has led to the discovery of "progressive plasticity," a three-stage model of metastatic evolution in which cancer cells reprogram through a fetal progenitor state before differentiating into aggressive, non-intestinal lineages. Her work has identified the transcription factor PROX1 as a key regulator of this process and has led to the development of novel L1CAM-targeting antibody-drug conjugates and novel immunotherapies targeting oncofetal states.