Laura Doherty, Ph.D.

Laura Doherty is a research scientist who joined the PRISM team at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in 2021. The PRISM platform enables the identification of potential patient populations, biomarkers, and candidate target pathways for novel small molecules in cancer cells. Her work focuses on leveraging computational analysis and experimental approaches to understand the mechanism of action of novel therapeutic candidates with industry collaborators.

Doherty has been awarded the Harvard University Certificate of Distinction in Teaching for Science of the Physical Universe 27: Science and Cooking (2017). She was also awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) graduate research fellowship (2016) and was selected as a graduate student trainee for a National Institute of Health training grant in chemical biology (2015).

Doherty earned a B.S. in biology with a second major in chemistry from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Subsequently, she earned her Ph.D. in chemical biology at Harvard University. During her graduate studies, she was jointly mentored by Sara Buhrlage at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Peter Sorger at Harvard Medical School and the Laboratory of Systems Pharmacology, and her work was focused on the therapeutic potential of targeting deubiquitinating enzymes in cancer.