Dr. Mona earned her MS in Organic Chemistry from Université Montpellier 2, with part of her training taking place at Hoffman-La Roche where she developed novel drug delivery approaches for small peptides for the treatment of diabetes mellitus. She then completed her PhD in Pharmacology at Université de Sherbrooke with publications in drug discovery, medicinal chemistry, cell signaling, and crystallography.

In 2016, Dr. Mona joined the Ahmanson Translational Theranostics Division of the Department of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology at UCLA as a postdoctoral fellow where she focused on theranostics development and target validation. She was promoted to Assistant Professor in 2020 and currently spearheads preclinical and translational theranostics research for the Division.

Dr. Mona has active projects for multiple theranostics indications – including prostate cancer, kidney cancer, and glioblastoma – with collaborators both inside and outside the United States. The diversity of her research is enabled by her group’s foundational pillars: the reverse translation of cancer resistance mechanisms to therapy, development of murine models of disease, and identifying, advancing, and evaluating novel theranostics targets and ligands.