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John P. Leonard and Gwirtzman Family Research Scholar Faculty
Meyer Cancer Center Faculty
Department of Medicine Faculty
Department of Pharmacology Faculty
Darko Barisic is a tenure-traack Assistant Professor of Cancer Biology at Weill Cornell Medicine, with appointments in the Division of Hematology and Medical Oncology, the Department of Medicine and the Department of Pharmacology, and a member of the Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center. He founded the Barisic Lab in 2024.
His work centers on chromatin remodelers and how they control access to the genome. During his PhD with Dirk Schübeler at the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel he showed that ISWI and SWI/SNF are not interchangeable openers of chromatin, and that distinct groups of transcription factors depend on one remodeler family or the other (Nature 2019). As a postdoctoral fellow with Ari Melnick at Weill Cornell he established that ARID1A sets the order in which PU.1 and NF-kB bind chromatin during the germinal center reaction, and that its loss diverts B cells toward a pre-memory state that primes follicular lymphoma (Cancer Cell 2024). His independent laboratory has extended this program from single nucleosomes to whole chromosomes.
He studied Biology and Chemistry at the University of Zagreb, received his PhD in Genetics from the University of Basel in 2017 and completed postdoctoral training in cancer genetics at Weill Cornell in 2024. His research has been supported by the Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds (PhD Fellowship), the Swiss National Science Foundation (Postdoctoral Fellowship), Lymphoma Reseach Foundation (Postdoctoral Fellowship), the National Cancer Center (Postdoctoral Fellowship) and the NIH (NCI K99/R00), and his laboratory is currently funded by the NIH, the Starr Cancer Consortium, Blood Cancer United, the Leukemia Research Foundation, the Andrew McDonough B+ Foundation and American Cancer Society.