Madeline Bush

Madeline Bush discovered her passion for studying developmental cancer biology while shadowing in the St. Jude solid tumor clinic. She hopes to better understand these tumors to develop more effective therapies.

Bush earned her bachelor’s degree in biology in 2017 from Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. There, she was awarded a grant by the College of Science and Engineering Research Center to research mechanisms of antibiotic resistance in multiple gram-positive bacterial species and look for novel therapeutic targets.

Bush currently works in the lab of Mark Hatley, MD, PhD, Oncology, where she researches rhabdomyosarcoma (RMS) using various experimental approaches including iPSCs, organ explant culture and genetically engineered mouse models. Her goal is to determine the mechanism of transformation in RMS. She earned her master’s degree from the St. Jude Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences in June 2019.

“There is an outstanding amount of collaboration here at St. Jude thanks to the positive environment across the organization,” she says. “You can really sense how strongly everyone feels about how working together improves all of our goals.”

Hometown: Orinda, California

Dissertation: Determining the Mechanism of Transformation for Rhabdomyosarcoma

Publications
Claunch KM, Bush M, Evans CR, Malmquist JA, Hale MC, McGillivray SM. Transcriptional profiling of the clpX mutant in Bacillus anthracis reveals regulatory connection with the lrgAB operon. Microbiology, 2018. 164(4):659-669