Katie Maher joins the IASLC as its Member Experience Coordinator. A graduate of Colorado State University in Business Administration, Katie has a wide array of diverse experience in marketing, content creation, customer service and event planning. And as part of the Member Experience team, Katie will provide incredible support to our members, meeting attendees, partners and other stakeholders.

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.