James Baraldi

For clinical research professional James Baraldi (MPhil ’26), the Master of Philosophy in Liberal Arts offered the opportunity to challenge himself while following an intellectual passion that could help transform treatments of cancers of the central nervous system (CNS). “I felt that the MPhil would bring together my broad research interests and help me direct them into a coherent thesis,” he says. “I wanted to come in with questions, not answers, and have room for exploration.”

James’ goal was to develop a philosophical work on neuroimmunooncology—an emerging biomedical subspecialty in CNS cancer therapies—for a wide audience, from biomedical professionals to cancer patients and other advocates. He was tackling a scientific frontier. The biomedical community has only recently begun to redefine ‘immune privilege,’ the unique relationship the CNS has with the immune system; rather than being completely isolated, the CNS does communicate and interact with the immune system, and a better understanding of this interface could lead to breakthroughs in immunotherapies for neurological cancers and other CNS diseases.

“Taking the principles of immunotherapy for systemic cancers outside of the central nervous system and applying those principles to central nervous system cancers is relatively new,” he explains, “and the reason why that has been difficult is something that I addressed in the very beginning of my thesis.” 

James launched his MPhil curriculum with two Department of Biology courses—Biological Foundations for Bioengineering and Biotechnology: Cellular and Molecular Biology, a fall 2024 course, and Biological Foundations for Bioengineering and Biotechnology: Genomics and Omics Technologies, offered in spring 2025. He chose the courses to bridge the gap between his own biology, neuroscience, and clinical trials background and the applications-focused thesis he envisioned. The result was a deepened understanding of analytical tools such as pathway analysis and omics technologies that prepared James with a solid foundation to collect supporting evidence for the claims he would make in his final thesis. “Translational intellectual experience is what I got out of that pair of courses,” he says. “They provided a lot of concrete direction for me.”

The courses were so influential that they pivoted his project’s focus—something possible in the self-directed MPhil program. “It wouldn’t be a work of philosophy so much as a work of applied conceptual guidance,” he says of the shift. “I wanted to challenge myself more. I wanted to go in the more medical direction.”

Instead of enrolling in philosophy and ethics classes to finish his degree, as originally planned, James stuck with the physical sciences. “Philosophy for me would have been the easier route. But it wouldn’t have been as useful. I was thinking the more difficult I make it, the more I put in, the more I get out of it.”

He also chose a neuro-oncology MD and an immunooncology PhD as his thesis advisors. “That pair of complementary perspectives is where the coursework led me,” he says. “Theirs was the sort of judgment I wanted brought to bear on what I had written.”

His interdisciplinary research throughout the program concluded in a manuscript entitled “Neuroimmunooncology: From Translational Frontiers to Clinical Horizons,” which breaks down the eponymous discipline into three parts—tumor immunobiology in the CNS, translational science, and clinical applications.

“Consistent with what the MPhil is, what I tried to do is expand the scope of the understanding of the applicability of cancer treatment to something as intractable as brain cancer,” he says. Furthermore, the thesis serves as an example of why a partnership between the liberal arts and fields like biomedicine is valuable. “There’s always new evidence in clinical trials and new questions being asked and explored in the lab. That evidence does not reinterpret itself,” he declares. “Filtering physical science through a liberal arts framework allows us to understand what the evidence actually means in the real world and to actual people.”

A next step for James is to develop his thesis into a book and make an introduction to neuroimmunooncology more accessible to all brain cancer stakeholders.