Dr. Christina Cho is a cancer immunobiologist whose research focuses on how the tumor microenvironment drives disease progression and resistance to therapy. Her journey in biomedical research began as an undergraduate at UCLA, where—under the mentorship of Dr. Sherilyn Gordon Burroughs—she studied mechanisms of chronic and acute graft rejection in liver transplant patients. There, she learned that long-term immunosuppression increases cancer risk, sparking her interest in how the immune system regulates cancer.

She earned her Ph.D. in Regenerative and Cancer Cell Biology at Albany Medical College, where she investigated how extracellular matrix remodeling promotes tumor survival and chemoresistance. As a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Serge Fuchs' lab at the University of Pennsylvania, she studied immune–tumor–stroma interactions, uncovering how colorectal and pancreatic cancers disrupt type I interferon signaling to evade immune responses. She continued her postdoctoral training at Yale School of Medicine in the laboratory of Dr. Lieping Chen, where she focused on translational immuno-oncology, using spatial biology tools to study immune exclusion and resistance to immune checkpoint blockade.

Dr. Cho joined the University of Iowa in September 2025 as an Assistant Professor, where she leads an independent research lab focused on immune evasion, novel immunotherapeutic targets, and reprogramming the tumor microenvironment to support effective anti-tumor immunity.