Dr. Rudin is a board-certified medical oncologist specializing in the care of patients with lung cancer. In addition to serving as Chief of the Thoracic Oncology Service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, He co-chairs the Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group Thoracic Committee, and is a member of the National Cancer Institute Thoracic Malignancies Steering Committee. He directs a broad research program of therapeutic research with the ultimate goal of improving the outcome for patients with lung cancer. His research includes laboratory-based investigations to identify and test novel treatment approaches to lung cancer, early-phase clinical trials to bring these ideas to the clinic, and later-phase studies to establish the efficacy of these new approaches. They are interested in small cell and non-small cell lung cancers. Some of the strategies his group has explored both in the laboratory and in the clinic include turning back on genes silenced in cancer, re-activating cancer cell death pathways, and treating lung cancer with a cancer-specific virus.

Dr Dominic Graham Rothwell. NAB Team Leader, Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute Cancer Biomarker Centre, University of Manchester, UK. After obtaining a BSc (Hon) in Applied Genetics from the University of Liverpool I studied for my DPhil with Professor Ian Hickson at the Weatherall Institute, University of Oxford investigating the functional role DNA repair genes. After this I moved into more translational research, initially with Dr John Norton looking for molecular markers in multiple myeloma before joining Professor Robert Hawkins laboratory at the University of Manchester where I was responsible for developing molecular monitoring of immunotherapy trials including CAR T-cells and the establishment of a GCP compliant facility. In 2011 I joined the Nucleic Acid Biomarker (NAB) team of Professor Caroline Dive at the CRUK Manchester Institute and began my current research focus on the molecular analysis of blood borne biomarkers for use in cancer. This work focusses on utilising circulating free DNA (cfDNA) and circulating tumour cells (CTC) to enable the molecular characterisation of tumours at the genetic, epigenetic and transcriptional level from a patient blood sample. I took over as Team Leader of NAB in November 2019.

After completing his undergraduate work at Brown University, Dr. Roper received his M.D. at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. He completed an internship and residency in internal medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. He subsequently obtained a Master’s in Clinical Research Methods from Columbia University, Mailman School of Public Health and was an Instructor in Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College. He completed medical oncology training through the NHLBI-NCI Hematology Oncology Fellowship program and is board certified in Medical Oncology. Dr. Roper joined the Developmental Therapeutics Branch as a Physician-Scientist Early Investigator in 2019. Dr. Roper's laboratory is focused on small cell lung cancer and other neuroendocrine tumors. His goals are to 1) decipher the biologic mechanisms of SCLC and other neuroendocrine tumors that may, in turn, predict response or lack of response to immune checkpoint inhibition; 2) elucidate epigenetic mechanisms which may drive recurrent, treatment refractory SCLC and other neuroendocrine tumors; and 3) establish pre-clinical, patient-derived organoid models of rare neuroendocrine tumors.

Dr. Rekhtman received a Bachelor’s degree from New York University (New York, NY) and an MD, PhD degree from Albert Einstein College of Medicine (Bronx, NY) with the Alpha Omega Alpha distinction and the award from the American Medical Women Association. She completed residency in pathology and a fellowship in surgical pathology at the Johns Hopkins Hospital (Baltimore, MD), followed by a cytopathology fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC, New York, NY). After completing training in 2008, she joined MSKCC as a thoracic pathologist and cytopathologist, where she currently serves as an Attending Pathologist. Dr. Rekhtman’s research focuses on histopathologic, immunohistochemical, and molecular aspects of thoracic tumors, with the goal to advance the diagnostic criteria and define clinically relevant subsets and biomarkers. She has a special interest in investigating characteristics of lung carcinomas defined by specific genomic alterations and neuroendocrine cancers. Dr. Rekhtman has published over 150 papers and multiple book chapters. She is the main editor and author of the book titled “Quick Reference Handbook for Surgical Pathologists”, the 2nd edition of which was published in 2019. Dr. Rekhtman has been an invited speaker at multiple national and international conferences, and serves as a co-director of the annual MSKCC/Massachusetts General Hospital course on thoracic pathology. She is a member of the NCI Steering Committee for Thoracic Malignancies and International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer pathology panel, among others. She is a member of Editorial Boards of several journals, and serves as an Associated Editor at Modern Pathology.

Alvaro Quintanal Villalonga is a lung cancer researcher with translational and basic research experience in the field of molecular oncology and targeted therapies, with a special focus on overcoming therapy resistance and combination therapies. During his PhD at the Spanish National Cancer Research Center (CNIO) he studied the role of the tyrosine kinase receptors FGFR (Fibroblast Growth Factor Receptor)1 and FGFR4 in lung cancer. He demonstrated that the pro-oncogenic effects of both FGFRs is conditional and described the molecular contexts in which these are pro-tumoral. On these projects they identified biomarkers of response to FGFR inhibitors (FGFRi) in monotherapy and described the high efficacy of the combination of EGFRis and FGFRis in a subset of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients, leading to the initiation of two phase I/II clinical trials with these inhibitors and one patents application. In addition, he led other basic/translational projects related to topics including prognostic/predictive biomarker identification, platinum resistance and novel therapies for lung cancer. In March 2018, Dr. Quintanal Villalonga was recruited by Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to join Dr. Rudin’s lab, where he focuses his research on the identification of molecular drivers of lineage plasticity in lung cancer leading to histological transdifferentiation from adenocarcinoma to either squamous or small cell carcinoma (SCLC); in the single cell transcriptomic characterization of SCLC; and in the identification of novel therapeutic targets in SCLC, with a focus on chemotherapy resistance.

My lab focuses on the development of new treatment paradigms for lung cancer using three primary tools: genetic, epigenetic, and transcriptomic analyses; functional genomics using CRISPR-Cas9; and, high-fidelity patient-derived models of lung cancer. In addition to my primary research focus, I direct the Perlmutter Cancer Center Preclinical Therapeutics Program, which acquires viable human tumor cells from the clinic for the development of cancer models and tests experimental cancer therapeutics in the preclinical setting.

Dr. Paz-Ares (MD, Ph.D.) is currently Chair of the Medical Oncology Department at the Hospital Universitario 12 de Octubre, Associate Professor at the Universidad Complutense, and Head of the Lung Cancer Unit at National Oncology Research Center, all in Madrid. He graduated with a degree in Medicine from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, in 1986, and was trained as a resident in Medical Oncology at Hospital 12 de Octubre (1988-2001). In 1993, he completed a Ph.D. in Medicine at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. He was a postdoctoral ESMO Research Fellow in Medical Oncology at the Beatson Oncology Centre, University of Glasgow, (1993– 1995), and completed a Master’s degree in Clinical Pharmacology at the University of Glasgow in 1995. Before the current position he was Chair of the Medical Oncology Department at the Virgen del Rocío University Hospital in Seville (2007-2014), Head of the Pharmacology Unit and responsible for Early Clinical Studies of Thoracic and Genitourinary Tumours at the University Hospital "12 de Octubre" in Madrid (1995–1999; 2000–2007), and Visiting Research Fellow in the Prostate Cancer Programme at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, MA, USA (1999–2000). Luis Paz-Ares’s research focuses on lung cancer and new therapeutic strategies development, both at the lab and clinical sides, and has published more than 340 articles in peer review journals including New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, Lancet Oncology, Nature Medicine, Journal of Clinical Oncology and many others. He has served as a member of several committees, including ASCO and ESMO meeting Scientific Committees, European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer Protocol Review Committee and Audit Committee, the Spanish Agency of Medicines and Medical Devices and the European Medicines Agency. He is the Chief Medical Officer of the AECC where he also seats at the Board.

Dr. Owonikoko is a Professor and Vice Chair for Faculty Development in the Department of Hematology and Medical Oncology at Emory University. He is also a Georgia Research Alliance Distinguished Cancer Scientist. He received his medical degree from the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife Nigeria in 1991 and a doctoral degree in Anatomic Pathology from the Heinrich Heine University, Dusseldorf, Germany in 2000. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA from 2000 to 2002. He completed Internal Medicine residency training at the Graduate Hospital, Drexel University in Philadelphia in 2005 followed by a clinical fellowship in Hematology/Medical Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh in 2008. He has been on faculty at Emory University since 2008 and has focused his translational research activities on lung cancer, thyroid cancer and early phase drug development. Dr. Owonikoko has received peer-reviewed grant funding from the NIH, DOD and Georgia Cancer Coalition. He has published over 230 peer-reviewed manuscripts in high impact journals including New England Journal of Medicine, Cell, Science, Nature, CA Cancer Journal, Cancer Cell, Lancet Oncology, JCO, Cancer Discovery, Nature Communications, Oncogene, Cancer Research, Clinical Cancer Research and Journal of Thoracic Oncology.

Matthew G. Oser MD, PhD, is a Physician-Scientist in the Lowe Center for Thoracic Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) and an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. After earning his MD and PhD from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Dr. Oser completed his internship and residency in Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston. He subsequently completed medical oncology fellowship training at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Massachusetts General Hospital combined program, and performed his post-doctoral work in Dr. William G. Kaelin Jr’s laboratory at DFCI. Since 2019, he is the principal investigator of his own laboratory at DFCI. Dr. Oser’s research focuses on using CRISPR/Cas9 to understand mechanisms that control neuroendocrine differentiation in SCLC and to identify novel targeted therapies for SCLC. Dr. Oser has been the recipient of a Lung Cancer Research Foundation Career Development Award, a NIH K08 career development award, and a Damon Runyon Clinical Investigator Award.