Jonathan Nakashima has more than 15 years of experience developing preclinical oncology models. Under a California Institute for Regenerative Medicine fellowship, he received his doctorate in Medical and Molecular Pharmacology at UCLA, where he developed genetically engineered and patient-derived xenograft models to study cancers of the central and peripheral nervous systems. He continued on with his post-doctoral training in the department of Neurobiology, where he received a Kirschstein National Research Service Award to study the cell-interactions in the brain tumor microenvironment. After his academic training, he joined Crown Bioscience, where he served as a Study Director for in vitro and in vivo projects, including solid tumor PDX studies, PDX screens and syngeneic studies. He joined Certis in 2018 as employee number 3, and now oversees the company’s R&D initiatives, patient-directed orthotopic PDX (O-PDX) pharmacology studies and the development and implementation of translational oncology assays for drug development.