Dr. Stephanie J. Bouley, Ph.D., is a Research Fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital under the mentorship of Dr. James Walker. She received her Ph.D. in Experimental and Molecular Medicine from Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH. Dr. Bouley is focused on identifying novel therapies to treat neurofibromatosis type 1. Stephanie is originally from Rhode Island where she currently resides with her mom and her dog Daisy. Dr. Bouley is the recipient of a Dorothy and Spiro Latsis Fellowship in Neurofibromatosis Research from Boston Children’s Hospital and is a former CTF Young Investigator awardee. She is also a former Fulbright recipient.
In her free time, Stephanie likes to play role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons and make dice.

Perturbation of signaling networks to identify novel therapeutic targets in NF1

To address the necessity for new therapeutic targets, we have taken a multipronged approach to identify molecular signatures associated with NF1 loss. Using a panel of pairs of NF1-deficient (NF1-/-) and normal type (NF1-/+) isogenic patient-derived or CRISPR-edited NF1-deficient SCs, we conducted profiling of the activated kinome, total and phosphoproteome, and transcriptome signatures. We have identified several kinases with altered activity, proteins with altered phosphorylation patterns, and genes with altered transcription levels. We performed comparison analyses between two isogenic sets of patient-derived SCs to identify overlapping hits, and in doing so, we were able to refine our list of potential targets. Finally, by combining our data sets we used network analysis to identify pathways with increased activity based on changes between NF1-/- and NF1-/+ SC lines. We hypothesize that further interrogation and perturbation of signaling networks identified as altered between NF1-/- and NF1-/+ cells will reveal novel therapeutic targets for treating NF1-deficient tumors.