Dr. Camilla dos Santos

Camila dos Santos, PhD is an Associate Professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL). Dr. dos Santos has dedicated her research to uncovering how physiological experiences—such as pregnancy, infection, and hormonal transitions—reshape the mammary gland and influence breast cancer risk in young women. She uses molecular and cellular tools to uncover how these events alter breast cells, with a focus on mechanisms that promote or suppress tumor initiation. They discovered that pregnancy induces lasting changes in mammary epithelial cells by modifying chromatin accessibility, transcriptional identity, tissue stiffness, and breast immunity. More recently, they showed that systemic infections, such as urinary tract infections (UTIs), accelerate tumorigenesis in BRCA1-mutant mice by remodeling the mammary microenvironment and expanding tumor-initiating basal-luminal progenitors. This work highlights how non-mammary insults indirectly drive breast cancer risk through immune and stromal crosstalk. Their approaches integrate organoid cultures, mouse models, chromatin profiling, and single-cell technologies to define how reproductive and immune history shape mammary cell fate. By understanding how normal development and external stressors intersect with genetic susceptibility, Dr. dos Santos group aims to identify new biomarkers and prevention strategies for breast cancer in young women—especially those not captured by traditional risk models.
For her research in normal breast development and breast cancer, she has been granted a series of prestigious awards, including the Rita Allen Foundation Award (2016), the V-Foundation for Cancer Research Award (2016), the Pershing Square Sohn Cancer Research Award (2018), the AACR-Breast Cancer Research Foundation Young Investigator Award (2018), and the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Faculty Award (2021), the Breast Cancer Alliance Award (2023), and the Breast Cancer Research Foundation Award (2023, 2025).