Project Team

Peter Houghton, Ph.D.

Dr. Peter J. Houghton received his Ph.D. from the University of London (Institute of Cancer Research) 1977, he joined the faculty of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis Tennessee and became Chair of Molecular Pharmacology (1992-2009) and co-lead for the Solid Malignancies Program (1988-2009). Dr. Houghton became Director, Childhood Cancer and Blood Diseases, Nationwide Children’s Hospital (2009-2014), and subsequently Director Greehey Children’s Cancer Research Inst. San Antonio (2014-2020); He is Professor Emeritus, Molecular Medicine, UTHSA, and has published approximately 380 peer-reviewed articles focused on childhood cancer. He pioneered development of patient derived xenografts (PDXs) as preclinical models and has used these to develop novel therapeutics largely focused on pediatric sarcoma and more recently on BRAF-mutant glioma. Dr. Houghton is currently supported by grants from the National Cancer Institute and the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT).

Siyuan Zheng, Ph.D.

Dr. Zheng received his Ph.D. in Bioinformatics from the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in 2009. He completed postdoctoral training at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine (2009-2011) and The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center (2011-2014). Following nearly three years as an Instructor at MD Anderson (2015-2017), he joined the Greehey Children’s Cancer Research Institute (GCCRI) in 2017 and established his independent research program.

His research integrates computational approaches with large-scale genomic datasets to understand how genetic alterations drive cancer initiation, progression, and therapeutic responses in both pediatric and adult cancers. Dr. Zheng has authored more than 80 peer-reviewed publications that have been cited over 19,000 times. His laboratory has also developed computational tools and performed genomic analyses of pediatric cancer xenograft models to advance translational cancer research. Dr. Zheng is a CPRIT Scholar in Cancer Research