Brandon Wright, Ph.D.

Dr. Brandon Wright supports the Childhood Cancer Data Initiative as a health science administrator in the Office of Data Sharing at NCI. Prior to joining CBIIT in 2021, he was an intramural postdoctoral fellow at NCI on a Cancer Research Training Award and an intramural postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) on an Intramural Research Training Award.

At NIMH, Dr. Wright investigated how physical and psychological stress alters brain circuits using patch clamp electrophysiology, and he was selected into the Neuroscience Scholars Program. Dr. Wright completed his doctoral training in physiology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. As a graduate student, Dr. Wright conceived a research project in which he applied cell culture patch clamp electrophysiology to study host-parasite interactions of schistosomiasis, a neglected tropical disease afflicting over 250 million people worldwide (annually killing 200,000+ in sub-Saharan Africa alone). This first-of-its-kind study resulted in identifying a protein that can have its function altered by parasite allergen/toxin-like secretions. While a graduate student, Dr. Wright was a Science and Medicine Graduate Research Scholar and a Lily’s Fund Fellow.

Dr. Wright received his Bachelor of Science degree in computer science at Grambling State University, where he received several academic achievement awards and honors. His senior software development thesis was entitled, “Online Adaptive Developmental Mathematics System for Children.” Most recently, he applied high-resolution electrophysiology techniques to investigate acute effects of FDA-approved proteasome inhibitor chemotherapeutics to study effects in cancer cells at time scales that have gone virtually untested in cancer research.