Dr. Mehta completed his undergraduate students at Duke University in mathematics and chemistry. He then completed his combined MD and PhD degrees at the David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California, Los Angeles and the California Institute of Technology, respectively. He performed his PhD work in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate Dr. David Baltimore, during which he discovered novel roles of microRNAs in hematopoietic stem cell function and in leukemia. Dr. Mehta subsequently completed his residency in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital followed by a combined hematology/oncology fellowship at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham Women's Hospital and Dana Farber Cancer Institute. As a fellow, Dr. Mehta completed his postdoctoral research in the laboratories of Dr. Eric Lander and Dr. Nir Hacohen. During this time he developed experimental and computational methods to study resistance mechanisms of pancreatic, gastroesophageal and colorectal cancers using single-cell and spatial genomics technologies on patient samples and in vitro models. Dr. Mehta’s work has been published in multiple journals including Immunity, Cell Stem Cell, Nature Immunology, Nature Genetics, Nature Cancer, Cancer Discovery, Science Translational Medicine and Cell Reports.

As a member of the gastrointestinal cancer group at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, Dr. Mehta works in multidisciplinary teams to optimize care for patients and leads the translational studies across several gastrointestinal tumor immuno-oncology clinical trials. Dr. Mehta’s research interests also include studies of tumor cell plasticity and resistance mechanisms using cutting-edge single-cell genomics and lineage tracing technologies. He has received numerous awards including the prestigious Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Physician Scientist Fellowship.