Dr. Karisa Colleen Schreck, MD

Karisa C. Schreck, MD, PhD, is a neuro-oncologist, co-director of the BRAF Brain Tumor Center at Johns Hopkins, and a translational clinician-scientist whose research focuses on developing molecularly guided therapies for glioma and other primary brain tumors. Dr. Schreck received her undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology and earned her combined MD-PhD from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 2012. Her doctoral research examined developmental signaling pathways in brain development and glioblastoma resistance to standard therapies, providing an early foundation for her interest in cancer-associated signaling pathways and therapeutic resistance. She completed her internship at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, followed by neurology residency at The Johns Hopkins Hospital from 2013 to 2016. She then pursued neuro-oncology fellowship training through the joint Johns Hopkins–NIH program, where she focused on targeted and metabolic therapies for primary brain tumors. During fellowship, she also completed postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Dr. Christine Pratilas, studying mechanisms of resistance to targeted therapy in BRAF-altered glioma and therapeutic strategies that exploit ERK pathway dysregulation. She continues to collaborate closely with Dr. Pratilas and shares laboratory space as part of this ongoing translational research partnership. Dr. Schreck’s research program is centered on understanding how oncogenic signaling pathways drive brain tumor growth, treatment resistance, and therapeutic vulnerability. By defining how pathways such as BRAF/MAPK/ERK can be molecularly controlled, her work aims to identify rational targeted therapies and combination strategies for patients with glioma. This integrated training across neurology, neuro-oncology, and translational cancer biology positions her to move discoveries from the laboratory into biomarker-driven clinical trials for patients with difficult-to-treat brain tumors.