Kristin Higgins, M.D., specializes in the treatment of lung and head and neck cancers. She completed residency in Radiation Oncology at Duke University, as well as an internship in internal medicine. She attended medical school at Tulane Univer-sity in New Orleans, LA. She earned a B.S. in neuroscience at Van-derbilt University and graduated magna cum laude. Throughout her training Dr. Higgins received numerous honors, including in-duction into Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society, and the Roentgen Resident/Fellow Research Award at Duke University, and the ASCO Bradley Stuart Beller Merit Award. Dr. Higgins is an Associate Professor within the Emory School of Medicine and serves as the Medical Director of Radiation Oncolo-gy at the main campus location. She leads numerous Winship Clinical Trials that examine innovative treatment approaches in the treatment of lung cancer. One such clinical trial is LU005, A NRG Oncology/Alliance study comparing chemoradiation with or without immunotherapy for limited stage small cell lung cancer. This clinical trial is funded by the National Cancer Institute and provides a novel treatment approach for patients with newly diagnosed small cell lung cancer. Dr. Higgins has authored and coauthored over 60 scientific, peer-reviewed manuscripts and abstracts and given many oral presentations at national and international meetings. Dr. Higgins is a member of multiple professional organizations including the American Society for Radiation Oncology, the American Board of Radiology, the International Association for the study of Lung Cancer, The American Society of Clinical Oncology, and the Radiation Therapy Oncology Group. In her free time, Dr. Higgins enjoys spending time with her husband Darren and her small children, Hunter and Parker. She also enjoys running, traveling, reading, fine dining, and wine tasting.

Luigi Marchionni, M.D., Ph.D. is Associate Professor and vice-Chair for Computational and Systems Pathology at Weill Cornell Medicine. He has extensive experience in the analysis and interpretation of multi-omics and imaging data. Dr. Marchionni’s current research focuses on knowledge integration across different “omics” and imaging data types, the development of novel prediction algorithms for cancer prognostication and therapy selection, and the integration of “omics-based” predictors into current cancer patients clinical management. Dr. Marchionni works in close collaboration with “wet lab” researchers, to uncovering genetic contributions to interesting cancer phenotypes. To this end, in the past 10 years, Dr. Marchionni has worked closely with Drs. Hann and Tran to decipher the mechanisms underlying chemo-radiation resistance in small cell lung cancer through the integration of genome-wide data from patient derived xenografts.

Dr. Hanash joined MD Anderson in July 2012 to lead the McCombs Institute for Cancer Early Detection and Treatment. He was previously program head for Molecular Diagnostics at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington. Dr. Hanash’s interests and expertise focus on the development and application of integrated approaches for the molecular profiling of cancer, with particular emphasis on the development of biomarkers for cancer early detection. A major focus has been on the development of blood based biomarkers for the early detection of lung cancer.

Julie George, PhD, is Professor of Molecular Head and Neck Oncology at the University of Cologne, Germany. She completed her PhD at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, Germany, before pursuing post-doctoral studies on cancer genomics at the University of Cologne. The focus of her research is to understand the biological processes of cancer and to study the evolutionary adaption of cancer to therapeutic response with a focus on small cell lung cancer (SCLC). Her work employs multi-disciplinary approaches for to study of patient tumors, which includes genome, transcriptome and single-cell sequencing technologies, computational evaluation of complex data sets, as well as functional characterization of patient-derived tumor models.

Dr. Gay graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 2005 (BA, Biology) and then enrolled at New York University School of Medicine, where he obtained his PhD (2011, Cellular & Molecular Biology) and MD (2013) degrees. He completed his residency at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston before joining MD Anderson Cancer Center in 2015 as a clinical fellow. In 2019, Dr. Gay was appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Thoracic/Head & Neck Medical Oncology. As a clinical investigator, Dr. Gay designs and oversees clinical trials for a variety of thoracic malignancies with a particular focus in small cell lung cancer. Dr. Gay’s research includes identifying novel therapeutics and predictive biomarkers for patients with small cell lung cancer.

Eric received his PharmD from the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy then went on to receive his PhD from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine under the mentorship of physician-scientist Charlie Rudin. His thesis work focused on using patient-derived xenograft (PDX) models of small cell lung cancer to study mechanisms of acquired resistance to chemotherapy. He joined Harold Varmus's group for his postdoctoral work in 2018 and has been developing mouse models of oncogenic and histologic transformation in lung cancer. Eric is a Kenneth G. and Elaine A. Langone Fellow of the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation and lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in NYC.

I am a medical oncologist at UT Southwestern specializing in the care of lung cancer patients, with a focus on small cell lung cancer (SCLC). My laboratory, located in the Hamon Center for Therapeutic Oncology, focuses on translational research in SCLC and other aggressive neuroendocrine tumors. We leverage a large panel of patient-derived xenograft (PDX) models that closely recapitulate the clinical features of their corresponding patients to discover new targets and develop new therapies for this deadly disease. Our two current areas of focus are: (1) strategies to overcome or circumvent chemotherapy cross-resistance, which renders relapsed SCLC refractory to further care, and (2) elucidation of the mechanism by which lineage transdifferentiation between lung adenocarcinoma and SCLC occurs.

Dr. Ata Abbas is a Research Scientist in the Division of Hematology and Oncology, Department of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University and an Associate Member of Case Comprehensive Cancer Center, Cleveland, Ohio. He has expertise in the areas of global transcriptional regulation, epigenetics, and genomics with a solid background in immunobiology. His current research is focused on 1) the identification of genomic, transcriptomic, and epigenomic signatures in SCLC metastases, and 2) understanding the mechanisms that SCLC utilizes to escape immune surveillance and to develop effective immunotherapeutic approaches to treat this highly metastatic malignancy.

Upon completing her PhD studies in Cambridge, Professor Caroline Dive moved to Aston University's School of Pharmaceutical Sciences in Birmingham where she established her own group studying mechanisms of drug induced tumour cell death, before moving to The University of Manchester to continue this research. Caroline was awarded a Lister Institute of Preventative Medicine Research Fellowship before joining the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute (CRUK MI) in 2003. Currently, she is Interim Director of the Institute and Director of its Cancer Biomarker Centre, with research spanning tumour biology, biomarker discovery and preclinical pharmacology alongside regulated laboratories for biomarker assay validation and qualification within clinical trials to Good Clinical Practice standards supporting clinical decision-making. Caroline was awarded the Pasteur-Weizmann/Servier International Prize in 2012 for her Biomarker Research, the AstraZeneca Prize for Women in Pharmacology in 2016 and was presented with the 2019 Heine H. Hansen Lectureship Award by the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC). In 2017, Caroline was awarded Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for her services to cancer research. Most recently, she became an elected member of EMBO (2020), received the inaugural Johann Anton Merck Award in recognition for exceptional contributions to the field of preclinical oncology (2020) and was the recipient of the Mary J. Matthews Pathology/Translational Distinguished Service Award by IASLC (2021). Caroline is the current President of the European Association for Cancer Research (2020 – 2022).