Dr. Heather Wakelee is the Chief and Professor of Medicine in the Division of Oncology at Stanford University. She is also the Deputy Director of the Stanford Cancer Institute. Dr. Wakelee has authored or co-authored over 200 medical articles on lung cancer and other thoracic malignancies and is involved in dozens of clinical trials related to lung cancer therapy and diagnostics. Her research focuses on many specific lung cancer subtypes defined by specific mutations in EGFR, ALK, ROS1, RET, BRAF and others. She is also involved in trials of adjuvant therapy, immunotherapy and anti-angiogenesis agents in addition to collaborations with colleagues focused in biomarkers and others focused in population science research. Dr. Wakelee is active in multiple national and international lung cancer research organizations including serving as the President-elect for the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC), co-chair of the thoracic committee and Stanford Principal Investigator for the Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group (ECOG-ACRIN), and as a Fellow of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (FASCO).

Silvia von Karstedt, PhD, is a cell biologist who specializes in the investigation of regulated cell death in cancer. For her undergraduate and graduate studies, she joined the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg, Germany, and Imperial College London, UK, respectively. Following a postdoctoral period at University College London with Henning Walczak and the Francis Crick Institute with Julian Downward, she set up her laboratory at the University of Cologne in September 2017. Her research interests include the function of different modes of cell death in KRAS-driven cancers and in the development and treatment of small cell lung cancer (SCLC). She has published in internationally renowned scientific journals as junior and senior author, received several poster and presentation prizes and is an active editorial board member and reviewer for nature publishing group journals.

Humsa Venkatesh received her undergraduate degree in Chemical Biology from the University of California, Berkeley and her PhD in Cancer Biology from Stanford University. After completing her postdoctoral work, she joined the Stanford faculty in 2019 and is now starting her Cancer Neuroscience research program as Assistant Professor at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. She has been recognized by the MIT Technology Review as a Pioneer Under 35 ‘TR35’ (2018), by Genetic Engineering News as a ‘Top 10 innovator to watch under 40’ (2019), and won the Science & SciLife Prize for Young Scientists (2019).

Dr. Venkatesh’s research studies the reciprocal interactions between the central nervous system and brain cancers. Her work emphasizes the electrical components of glioma pathophysiology and highlights the extent to which the brain and its neurons can control and facilitate disease progression. The understanding of these co-opting mechanisms has led to novel strategies to broadly treat cancers, by disabling their ability to electrically integrate into neural circuitry. Her pioneering research in this emerging field of cancer neuroscience aims to harness the systems level microenvironmental dependencies of tumor growth to develop innovative therapeutic treatments.

Kathryn Tully was raised in Manchester, NH and attended Trinity College for her undergraduate degree, where she received her B.S. in Biochemistry in 2016. Kathryn is currently a fifth year Ph.D. Candidate in the Pharmacology program at the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences. She is performing her dissertation research in the laboratories of Charles M. Rudin and Jason S. Lewis, where her research focuses on developing immunoPET tracers and radioimmunotherapy agents for the imaging and treatment of small cell lung cancer.

Anish Thomas is a clinical researcher and thoracic oncologist. The goals of his research program are: 1) to develop more effective therapies for patients with SCLC by targeting DNA replication, repair, and chromatin remodeling, and 2) genomic characterization of SCLCs to better understand the basis of treatment response and resistance. Work from his group has revealed replication stress as a transformative vulnerability of SCLCs characterized by high neuroendocrine differentiation, targetable by ATR inhibition (PMID: 33848478; PMID: 29252124), provided novel insights into the transcriptomic features that render low neuroendocrine SCLC more sensitive to immunotherapy (PMID: 34162872), and discovered a novel SCLC subset defined by the germline genotype and improved responses to DNA repair targeted drugs (PMID: 33504652).

Portia Thomas is an M.D./Ph.D. student at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, TN. Dr. Thomas graduated summa cum laude with departmental honors, earning a B.S. in Chemistry and B.A. in Biology from Erskine College in Due West, SC. She recently defended her thesis work under the mentorship of Christine Lovly, M.D., Ph.D. at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center. Dr. Thomas's work focused on profiling the immune microenvironment of SCLC in efforts to improve the application of immunotherapy in this disease. Her long-term career aspiration is to be a pediatric oncologist, researching immunotherapeutic strategies for pediatric high-risk solid tumors.

A/Prof Kate Sutherland is a Laboratory Head at The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI), developing state-of-the-art preclinical models of lung cancer. Kate completed her PhD in 2005 under the supervision of Profs Jane Visvader and Geoffrey Lindeman at WEHI. Upon completion of her studies, she moved to The Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam, where she undertook Postdoctoral studies in the laboratory of Prof Anton Berns. During this time Kate performed innovative studies that advanced the lung cancer field, by identifying the cell-of-origin of the two main subtypes of lung cancer. In 2013, Kate returned to WEHI to start her own laboratory dedicated to understanding tumour heterogeneity in lung cancer. In this time, she has developed new approaches and technologies to study lung cancer, leading to seminal findings on genetic drivers, the immune microenvironment and the role of the metabolome in these aggressive cancers. Kate has been the recipient of funding from Worldwide Cancer Research (UK), NHMRC and the Victorian Cancer Agency to support her work in designing precision medicine approaches for lung cancer patients. Her work has been published in high-impact journals including Cancer Cell, Cell Metabolism, PNAS and Journal of Thoracic Oncology. She serves on national and international committees (Lung Foundation Australia, Cancer Council of Victoria and the IASLC World Conference on Lung Cancer 2021). Kate passionately advocates for women in science, educating the next generation of research scientists and the value of fundamental lung cancer research in improving the treatment of patients.

Dr. Triparna Sen, Ph.D., is an Assistant Attending at the Department of Medicine in Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), New York, USA. She has a broad background in translational oncology research, with a special interest in thoracic malignancies. Her research aims to understand changes in cancer cells at the molecular level that contribute to their growth, metastasis, and drug resistance. She then uses this knowledge to develop improved therapeutic strategies for clinically relevant molecular subsets of lung cancer. Dr. Sen has received independent grant funding from the Department of Defense (DoD) Lung Cancer Research Program, the National Institute of Health (NIH/NCI), the Lung Cancer Research Foundation, and The International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC). She is the author of several peer-reviewed scientific manuscripts, and she is an active member of the IASLC, and the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). She is also the co-director of the MSKCC lung cancer patient-derived xenograft (PDX) program, a platform that has developed over 300 preclinical models. The PDX program is a resource widely used for conducting co-clinical trials, identifying therapies and biomarkers by investigators worldwide. She has received several awards for her contribution to lung cancer research, including the 40 under 40 in Cancer award, AAAS Martin and Rose Wachtel Cancer Research Award, AACR Women in Cancer Research scholar award, and AACR Scholar-in-training Jeffrey Lee Cousins fellowship and Immuno-Oncology-Young Investigator award. She is actively involved in outreach activities, mentoring and a passionate advocate of equal opportunity for women in STEM fields. She has served as the two-time president of the Association for Women in Science Gulf Coast Houston Chapter and currently on the leadership board of 500 Women Scientists NYC pod.

Dr. Sage trained at the University of Nice (PhD) in France and MIT (post-doc) before starting his research group at Stanford University in 2004. He is currently the Elaine and John Chambers Professor of Pediatric Cancer at Stanford and serves as the co-Director of the Cancer Biology PhD program. The Sage lab is fundamentally interested in the mechanism driving the proliferation of cells. Dr. Sage has been working for many years now on the RB tumor suppressor and how loss of RB promotes tumorigenesis in children and adult patients. Dr. Sage became initially interested in small cell lung cancer (SCLC) because of the nearly ubiquitous loss of RB in this cancer type and the intriguing relationship in mice and humans between loss of RB and the growth of neuroendocrine lesions. In the past few years, the Sage lab has developed pre-clinical models for SCLC and has used these models to investigate signaling pathways driving the growth of this cancer type as well as the mechanisms underlying how SCLC tumors become resistant to therapy.