Thuy Ngo, Ph.D.

  • Associate Professor of Molecular and Medical Genetics, School of Medicine
  • Member, CEDAR, OHSU Knight Cancer Institute, School of Medicine
  • Program in Molecular and Cellular Biosciences, School of Medicine

Biography

Dr. Thuy Ngo is interested in taking interdisciplinary approaches to develop novel methods for identifying biomarkers of cancer, detecting and elucidating developmental pathway of cancer and other medical diseases and conditions. The clinical and biological systems of interest include circulating cell-free DNA, RNA, extracellular vesicles, microbiome, tumor cells, tumor associated cells and tumor microenvironment. Her main tools are quantitative imaging, next generation sequencing, bioinformatics and molecular and cellular biology.

Ngo received her Ph.D. in biophysics and computational biology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2014 under the guidance of Dr. Taekjip Ha and her postdoc with Dr. Stephen Quake at Stanford University.

Education and training

  • Degrees

    • Ph.D., 2014, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Honors and awards

  • 2003 - National Mathematics Olympiad (Second Place) for College Student, Vietnam
  • 2006 - Honda YES Award, Honda Foundation, Japan
  • 2007 - Huygens Scholarship, The Dutch Minister of Education, Culture and Science, The Netherlands
  • 2009 - Best Poster Award (Second Place), Sumner School on Modern Developments in Spectroscopy, Noordwijk, The Netherlands
  • 2009 - Gregorio Weber Scholarship in Biophysics, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA
  • 2014 - Best Talk Award (First Place), Biophysics and Computational Biology Symposium, University of Illinois
  • 2014 - Best Poster Award (First Place), Midwest Chromatin and Epigenetics Meeting, Madison, Wisconsin
  • 2015 - Highlighted research article in Cell
  • 2017 - Cover Article for the journal Clinical Chemistry
  • 2018 - Cell-free RNA work featured in NYTimes, CNN, BBC, TIME Magazine, ABC News, The Guardian, US News, National Geographic and Daily Mail
  • 2018 - Cancer Research UK/OHSU Project Award
  • 2019 - Top 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2019 by MIT Technology Review for the cfRNA work

Publications

Publications

  • Activation of coagulation FXI promotes endothelial inflammation and amplifies platelet activation in a nonhuman primate model of hyperlipidemia

    Research and Practice in Thrombosis and Haemostasis
    1. Tia C.L. Kohs
    2. Helen H. Vu
    3. Kelley R. Jordan
    4. Iván Parra-Izquierdo
    5. Monica T. Hinds
    6. Joseph J. Shatzel
    7. Paul Kievit
    8. Terry K. Morgan
    9. Samuel Tassi Yunga
    10. Thuy T.M. Ngo
    11. Joseph E. Aslan
    12. Michael Wallisch
    13. Christina U. Lorentz
    14. Erik I. Tucker
    15. David Gailani
    16. Jonathan R. Lindner
    17. Cristina Puy
    18. Owen J.T. McCarty

  • Dependence of nucleosome mechanical stability on DNA mismatches

    eLife
    1. Thuy T.M. Ngo
    2. Bailey Liu
    3. Feng Wang
    4. Aakash Basu
    5. Carl Wu
    6. Taekjip Ha

  • Selective enrichment of plasma cell-free messenger RNA in cancer-associated extracellular vesicles

    Communications Biology
    1. Hyun Ji Kim
    2. Matthew J. Rames
    3. Florian Goncalves
    4. C. Ward Kirschbaum
    5. Breeshey Roskams-Hieter
    6. Elias Spiliotopoulos
    7. Josephine Briand
    8. Aaron Doe
    9. Joseph Estabrook
    10. Josiah T. Wagner
    11. Emek Demir
    12. Gordon Mills
    13. Thuy T.M. Ngo

  • Irreversible alteration of extracellular vesicle and cell-free messenger RNA profiles in human plasma associated with blood processing and storage

    Scientific Reports
    1. Hyun Ji Kim
    2. Matthew J. Rames
    3. Samuel Tassi Yunga
    4. Randall Armstrong
    5. Mayu Morita
    6. Anh T.P. Ngo
    7. Owen J.T. McCarty
    8. Fehmi Civitci
    9. Terry K. Morgan
    10. Thuy T.M. Ngo

  • Plasma cell-free RNA profiling distinguishes cancers from pre-malignant conditions in solid and hematologic malignancies

    npj Precision Oncology
    1. Breeshey Roskams-Hieter
    2. Hyun Ji Kim
    3. Pavana Anur
    4. Josiah T. Wagner
    5. Rowan Callahan
    6. Elias Spiliotopoulos
    7. Charles Ward Kirschbaum
    8. Fehmi Civitci
    9. Paul T. Spellman
    10. Reid F. Thompson
    11. Khashayar Farsad
    12. Willscott E. Naugler
    13. Thuy T.M. Ngo

  • Longitudinal analysis of human pancreatic adenocarcinoma development reveals transient gene expression signatures

    Molecular Cancer Research
    1. Jungsun Kim
    2. Taelor Ekstrom
    3. Wenli Yang
    4. Greg Donahue
    5. Dmytro Grygoryev
    6. Thuy T.M. Ngo
    7. John L. Muschler
    8. Terry Morgan
    9. Kenneth S. Zaret

  • Measuring DNA mechanics on the genome scale

    Nature
    1. Aakash Basu
    2. Dmitriy G. Bobrovnikov
    3. Zan Qureshi
    4. Tunc Kayikcioglu
    5. Thuy T.M. Ngo
    6. Anand Ranjan
    7. Sebastian Eustermann
    8. Basilio Cieza
    9. Michael T. Morgan
    10. Miroslav Hejna
    11. H. Tomas Rube
    12. Karl Peter Hopfner
    13. Cynthia Wolberger
    14. Jun S. Song
    15. Taekjip Ha

  • Diurnal stability of cell-free DNA and cell-free RNA in human plasma samples

    Scientific Reports
    1. Josiah T. Wagner
    2. Hyun Ji Kim
    3. Katie C. Johnson-Camacho
    4. Taylor Kelley
    5. Laura F. Newell
    6. Paul T. Spellman
    7. Thuy T.M. Ngo

  • Extreme mechanical diversity of human telomeric DNA revealed by fluorescence-force spectroscopy

    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
    1. Jaba Mitra
    2. Monika A. Makurath
    3. Thuy T.M. Ngo
    4. Alice Troitskaia
    5. Yann R. Chemla
    6. Taekjip Ha

  • Multiomics modeling of the immunome, transcriptome, microbiome, proteome and metabolome adaptations during human pregnancy

    Bioinformatics
    1. Mohammad Sajjad Ghaemi
    2. Daniel B. DiGiulio
    3. Kévin Contrepois
    4. Benjamin Callahan
    5. Thuy T.M. Ngo
    6. Brittany Lee-Mcmullen
    7. Benoit Lehallier
    8. Anna Robaczewska
    9. David McIlwain
    10. Yael Rosenberg-Hasson
    11. Ronald J. Wong
    12. Cecele Quaintance
    13. Anthony Culos
    14. Natalie Stanley
    15. Athena Tanada
    16. Amy Tsai
    17. Dyani Gaudilliere
    18. Edward Ganio
    19. Xiaoyuan Han
    20. Kazuo Ando
    21. Leslie McNeil
    22. Martha Tingle
    23. Paul Wise
    24. Ivana Maric
    25. Marina Sirota
    26. Tony Wyss-Coray
    27. Virginia D. Winn
    28. Maurice L. Druzin
    29. Ronald Gibbs
    30. Gary L. Darmstadt
    31. David B. Lewis
    32. Vahid Partovi Nia
    33. Bruno Agard
    34. Robert Tibshirani
    35. Garry Nolan
    36. Michael P. Snyder
    37. David A. Relman
    38. Stephen R. Quake
    39. Gary M. Shaw
    40. David K. Stevenson
    41. Martin S. Angst
    42. Brice Gaudilliere
    43. Nima Aghaeepour

  • Noninvasive blood tests for fetal development predict gestational age and preterm delivery

    Science
    1. Thuy T.M. Ngo
    2. Mira N. Moufarrej
    3. Marie Louise H. Rasmussen
    4. Joan Camunas-Soler
    5. Wenying Pan
    6. Jennifer Okamoto
    7. Norma F. Neff
    8. Keli Liu
    9. Ronald J. Wong
    10. Katheryne Downes
    11. Robert Tibshirani
    12. Gary M. Shaw
    13. Line Skotte
    14. David K. Stevenson
    15. Joseph R. Biggio
    16. Michal A. Elovitz
    17. Mads Melbye
    18. Stephen R. Quake

  • Precision and accuracy of single-molecule FRET measurements—a multi-laboratory benchmark study

    Nature Methods
    1. Björn Hellenkamp
    2. Sonja Schmid
    3. Olga Doroshenko
    4. Oleg Opanasyuk
    5. Ralf Kühnemuth
    6. Soheila Rezaei Adariani
    7. Benjamin Ambrose
    8. Mikayel Aznauryan
    9. Anders Barth
    10. Victoria Birkedal
    11. Mark E. Bowen
    12. Hongtao Chen
    13. Thorben Cordes
    14. Tobias Eilert
    15. Carel Fijen
    16. Christian Gebhardt
    17. Markus Götz
    18. Giorgos Gouridis
    19. Enrico Gratton
    20. Taekjip Ha
    21. Pengyu Hao
    22. Christian A. Hanke
    23. Andreas Hartmann
    24. Jelle Hendrix
    25. Lasse L. Hildebrandt
    26. Verena Hirschfeld
    27. Johannes Hohlbein
    28. Boyang Hua
    29. Christian G. Hübner
    30. Eleni Kallis
    31. Achillefs N. Kapanidis
    32. Jae Yeol Kim
    33. Georg Krainer
    34. Don C. Lamb
    35. Nam Ki Lee
    36. Edward A. Lemke
    37. Brié Levesque
    38. Marcia Levitus
    39. James J. McCann
    40. Nikolaus Naredi-Rainer
    41. Daniel Nettels
    42. Thuy Ngo
    43. Ruoyi Qiu
    44. Nicole C. Robb
    45. Carlheinz Röcker
    46. Hugo Sanabria
    47. Michael Schlierf
    48. Tim Schröder
    49. Benjamin Schuler
    50. Henning Seidel
    51. Lisa Streit
    52. Johann Thurn
    53. Philip Tinnefeld
    54. Swati Tyagi
    55. Niels Vandenberk
    56. Andrés Manuel Vera
    57. Keith R. Weninger
    58. Bettina Wünsch
    59. Inna S. Yanez-Orozco
    60. Jens Michaelis
    61. Claus A.M. Seidel
    62. Timothy D. Craggs
    63. Thorsten Hugel

  • Simultaneously monitoring immune response and microbial infections during pregnancy through Plasma cfRNA sequencing

    Clinical chemistry
    1. Wenying Pan
    2. Thuy T.M. Ngo
    3. Joan Camunas-Soler
    4. Chun Xiao Song
    5. Mark Kowarsky
    6. Yair J. Blumenfeld
    7. Ronald J. Wong
    8. Gary M. Shaw
    9. David K. Stevenson
    10. Stephen R. Quake

  • Defining single molecular forces required for notch activation using nano yoyo

    Nano Letters
    1. Farhan Chowdhury
    2. Isaac T.S. Li
    3. Thuy T.M. Ngo
    4. Benjamin J. Leslie
    5. Byoung Choul Kim
    6. Joshua E. Sokoloski
    7. Elizabeth Weiland
    8. Xuefeng Wang
    9. Yann R. Chemla
    10. Timothy M. Lohman
    11. Taekjip Ha

  • Effects of cytosine modifications on DNA flexibility and nucleosome mechanical stability

    Nature communications
    1. Thuy T.M. Ngo
    2. Jejoong Yoo
    3. Qing Dai
    4. Qiucen Zhang
    5. Chuan He
    6. Aleksei Aksimentiev
    7. Taekjip Ha

  • Asymmetric unwrapping of nucleosomes under tension directed by DNA local flexibility

    Cell
    1. Thuy T.M. Ngo
    2. Qiucen Zhang
    3. Ruobo Zhou
    4. Jaya G. Yodh
    5. Taekjip Ha

  • Nucleosomes undergo slow spontaneous gaping

    Nucleic acids research
    1. Thuy T.M. Ngo
    2. Taekjip Ha

  • A coarse-grained model of unstructured single-stranded DNA derived from atomistic simulation and single-molecule experiment

    Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation
    1. Christopher Maffeo
    2. Thuy T.M. Ngo
    3. Taekjip Ha
    4. Aleksei Aksimentiev

  • Molecular restructuring of water and lipids upon the interaction of DNA with lipid monolayers

    Journal of the American Chemical Society
    1. R. Kramer Campen
    2. Thuy T.M. Ngo
    3. Maria Sovago
    4. Jean Marie Ruysschaert
    5. Mischa Bonn