An internationally renowned physician-scientist and recognized expert on ovarian cancer, Dr. Karlan has more than 30 years of experience treating women with gynecologic cancers and investigating pressing clinical and translational questions related to gynecologic malignancies. Her clinical practice is dedicated to delivering cutting-edge compassionate cancer care to women and their families, and her research focuses on understanding the genetic drivers and phenotypic determinants of ovarian cancer, as well as hereditary predisposition to cancers, and molecular biomarkers for early detection, treatment, and prognostication. In 1989 she established a human tissue biorepository to collect fresh frozen tissue, serum, and germline DNA from women with ovarian and other gynecologic cancers in order to study cancers' biologic differences and develop improved treatments. This resource has been used in national and international collaborations including The Cancer Genome Atlas project (TCGA), Consortium of Investigators of Modifiers of BRCA1/2 (CIMBA), and Ovarian Cancer Association Consortium (OCAC) - partnerships that have helped to shape current standards of care for gynecologic oncology.

Dr. Karlan has also been at the forefront of scientific and clinical efforts related to women/families with BRCA and other cancer predisposition and inherited mutations. She currently serves as co-PI on a national effort using a digital platform to implement population-based genetic testing for BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations. Dr. Karlan holds several patents related to ovarian cancer research and has received multiple recognitions for her work including an American Cancer Society Research Professorship, the Society of Gynecologic Oncology Distinguished Service Award, the Ovarian Cancer National Alliance Rosalind Franklin Award for Excellence in Ovarian Cancer Research, and the National Cancer Institute Director's Service Award.
Board-certified in both obstetrics and gynecology and gynecologic oncology, Dr. Karlan received her undergraduate degree at Harvard-Radcliffe College and completed her medical degree at Harvard Medical School. She completed both a Clinical Residency and Post Doctoral Research Fellowship at Yale University and a Fellowship in Gynecologic Oncology at UCLA School of Medicine. After almost 30 years leading the gynecologic oncology program at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Dr. Karlan returned to UCLA in 2019 as Professor and Vice-Chair, Women's Health Research in Obstetrics and Gynecology and Director of Cancer Population Genetics at UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center.

In addition to her busy clinical practice and robust research portfolio, Dr. Karlan is passionate about training the next generation of clinicians and scientists, as well as advocating for women's health and the specialty of gynecologic oncology. She actively participates in medical student, residency, and fellowship training at UCLA is co-author of Surgery for Ovarian Cancer: Principles and Practice, and is Editor-in-Chief of her specialty's journals Gynecologic Oncology and Gynecologic Oncology Reports. Dr. Karlan was appointed by President Barack Obama to the National Cancer Advisory Board and is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine. She serves on multiple non-profit Boards and is Vice-Chair of the Board of Overseers for Harvard University.

Dr. Doris Benbrook holds the title of Presbyterian Health Foundation Presidential Professor with tenure in the College of Medicine at the University of Oklahoma. Her personal research program is focused on gaining better understanding of cancer development and progression,and developing no-to-low toxicity drugs to prevent and treat cancer and other diseases. She has expertise in translational research through participating in national and international clinical and translational research organizations and identified prognostic and predictive biomarkers. She led multi-disciplinary teams that produced a lead compound, Sulfur Heteroarotinoid A2 (SHetA2, NSC 726189 or OK-1) and obtained funding from the US National Cancer Institute, Rapid Access to Intervention Development (RAID), Rapid Access to Preventive Intervention Development (RAPID) and PREVENT Cancer Preclinical Drug Development programs to complete the preclinical testing and current Good Manufacturing Production of SHetA2 capsules needed for the first-in-human clinical trial of SHetA2. She recruited a team of experts capable of completing first-in-human studies at the Stephenson Cancer Center and led the development and submission of the IND (156700), which has allowed initiation of the first-in-human Phase 1 clinical trial of SHetA2 in advanced and recurrent cancer patients (clinicaltrials.gov: NCT04928508). Throughout this process, she developed curriculum to assist others at her institution in translation of their drugs and devices to clinical application. Dr. Benbrook was awarded the title of Master Mentor by the Oklahoma Shared Clinical and Translational Resources. She has been faculty in the clinical Ob/Gyn Department for over 30 years, and serves as co-leader of the Gynecologic Cancer Group at the Stephenson Cancer Center, which have provided her with opportunities to learn about the clinical aspects of gynecologic cancers and network with Gynecologic Oncologists. Dr. Benbrook has multiple national leadership roles that provide networking opportunities to develop and participate in multi-institutional trial, including serving as Co-Leader of the GYN Target Group of the MW Clinical Prevention Trials Network and member of GOG Partners Investigator Council Translational Research Subcommittee. 

Dr. Christos Patriotis obtained his M.Sc. in Biochemistry from the University of Sofia, Bulgaria in 1985 and his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in 1990. Postdoctoral training focused on signal transduction and tumor cell biology. He joined the faculty at Fox Chase Cancer Center in 1998; his research was directed toward understanding mechanisms of breast and ovarian cancer pathogenesis and identification of biomarkers associated with the early stages of the two types of cancer. This included development and characterization of animal models of breast and ovarian cancers, and high throughput microarray-based analysis of specimens obtained from human and animal models for biomarker discovery.

He joined the Cancer Biomarkers Research Group in March, 2007. He is involved in management and coordination of Cooperative Agreement awards of the Early Detection Research Network focused on breast, ovarian and other gynecological cancers. He provides leadership and direction of large, multi-center clinical validation studies of biomarkers for the early detection and prognosis of cancer. He directs the development of the EDRN Knowledge Environment to facilitate biomarker research within and outside the Network. This represents an integrated system of multiple data bases and informatics tools, which is being developed by the EDRN Informatics Center at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. EKE is based on a repository of Common Data Elements combined with the Object Oriented Data Technology middleware software developed at JPL. EDRN bioinformatics infrastructure enables interoperability among biomarker research groups, computing systems and distributed databases of biospecimens and biomarker data.

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Dr. Hisataka Kobayashi is a tenured senior investigator in the Molecular Imaging Branch at the National Cancer Institute/ NIH in Bethesda, MD. Dr. Kobayashi was awarded an M.D. and Ph.D. (Immunology/Medicine) from Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan. His interest is in developing the novel molecular imaging and therapeutic agents or technologies especially for targeting cancers. He has published over 250 scientific articles in clinical and preclinical bio-medical imaging over the last 20 years.

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Chris Sander started his career as a theoretical physicist and then switched to theoretical biology, in part inspired by the first completely sequenced genome. He founded two departments of computational biology - at the EMBL in Heidelberg and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York - and co-founded the research branch of the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge and a biotech startup with Millennium in Boston.

Chris joined the Harvard community in 2016 as Director of the cBio Center at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in the Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology, Professor of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School, Special Advisor for Quantitative Biology to the Ludwig Center at Harvard, and Associate Member of the Broad Institute. He is creating new connections between scientists at Dana-Farber and Harvard Medical School, including building translational collaborative bridges for scientists using quantitative sciences to solve biological problems.

With his group and collaborators, Chris aims to beat drug resistance in cancer using systems biology methods to develop combination therapies. They are also developing the next generation cBioPortal for cancer research and therapy, obtaining biomolecular structures and functional interactions on a large scale using evolutionary information, and adapting machine learning methods to mine millions of genomes.

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My research endeavors seek to bridge advances in novel technologies and therapeutics with current clinical oncology needs. Prior formal intensive training in biomedical research design at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health and at the National Institutes of Health places me in a unique position to translate advances in the lab to the bedside. Moreover, I have broadened my skill set in clinical investigation by completing the Scholars in Clinical Science Program, a two year structured training curriculum that led to a Master of Medical Sciences from Harvard Medical School. I also completed a clinical fellowship in Oncology through the Dana-Farber / Mass General Brigham Cancer Care Program. This breadth of clinical training exposed me to the day to day quandaries across the spectrum of solid and hematological tumors. Previously, I was involved with nanotechnology research at the National Cancer Institute where I truly first appreciated the meaning of interdisciplinary. I continue the spirit of this approach as Director of the Cancer Program within the MGH Center for Systems Biology. I am now poised to ask further challenging clinical questions in need of innovative solutions. My objectives are to refine and translate novel molecular imaging and nanosensing tactics into solid tumors. My efforts have led to inroads into point-of-care diagnostic solutions for resource-constrained regions globally. My daily research interactions involve an amalgam of chemists, material scientists, engineers, and clinicians as we continue to strive for interdisciplinary, innovative solutions to tackle biological problems plaguing cancer researchers.

Lew Cantley is widely known for his many seminal discoveries in signaling and metabolism, including the identification of PI3 kinase and its role in transformation, as well as groundbreaking work unraveling the complexities of protein kinase signaling--his work has had major impact across virtually every aspect of cancer cell biology. Lew was a Cell Bio faculty member from 1992-2003 before transitioning to the then newly formed HMS Department of Systems Biology in 2003. In 2012, Lew was recruited to Weill Cornell in New York City, where he served as Director of the Meyer Cancer Center. There, he built a remarkable program focused on the intersection of metabolism and signaling in cancer.

Lew rejoined the Department of Cell Biology at HMS and the DFCI-Cancer Cell Biology in 2022. 

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Dr. Ellisen is Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Program Director for Breast Medical Oncology at the Mass General Cancer Center. He is also co-Leader of the Breast Cancer Program at the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center. He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard University, MD and PhD degrees from Stanford University, and completed residency training, oncology fellowship training, and postdoctoral research training at Brigham and Women's Hospital, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Mass General, respectively. Dr. Ellisen is widely published in the fields of cancer biology, treatment and genetics. As Director of Breast and Ovarian Cancer Genetics at Mass General, Dr. Ellisen's clinical practice is focused on cancer risk assessment, cancer prevention and early detection. Research in Dr. Ellisen's laboratory is in the vanguard of revolutionizing cancer treatment through personalized cancer therapies. Dr. Ellisen is best known for his work on triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), one of the most aggressive forms of the disease. [Read More]

Ralph Scully is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the co-director of the Program in DNA Repair and Genomic Instability at the Cancer Research Institute, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Dr. Scully majored in Medical Sciences and English literature at the University of Cambridge (UK). He completed clinical medical training at University College London and received the M.B.B.S. degree (equivalent to the M.D. degree in the USA) in 1986. Following several years of additional training in internal medicine, he joined Prof. Herman Waldman’s laboratory as a graduate student and obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1994 for research on Mechanisms of Immunological Tolerance. He moved to Harvard for postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Dr. David Livingston at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. There, he discovered that the major hereditary breast/ovarian cancer predisposition genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2, act by regulating double strand break (DSB) repair and homologous recombination (HR). In 2001, he moved to the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center to establish a laboratory focused on homologous recombination, genomic instability and hereditary breast/ovarian cancer predisposition. His work has revealed new functions for BRCA1 and BRCA2 in regulating HR at sites of stalled replication and recently elucidated the mechanism underlying the Tandem Duplication “rearrangement signature” associated with BRCA1-linked cancer. His research has yielded promising new targets for therapy in BRCA-linked cancer. A major current focus of his laboratory is to identify the earliest signs of impending cancer in the overtly normal mammary epithelium. [Read More]

Gaddy Getz is an internationally acclaimed leader in cancer genomics and is pioneering widely used tools for analyzing cancer genomes. Getz is an institute member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where he directs the Cancer Genome Computational Analysis Group. Getz is a professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School, and he is a faculty member and director of bioinformatics at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Cancer Center and Department of Pathology. 

The Getz Laboratory specializes in cancer genome analysis, which includes two major steps. The first is characterization — cataloging of all genomic events and the mechanisms that created them during the clonal evolution of cancer (starting from normal cells and progressing to premalignancy, primary cancer, and emergence of resistance), and comparing events at the DNA, RNA, and protein levels between tumor and normal samples from an individual patient. The second is interpretation — analysis of the characterization data across a cohort of patients with the aim of identifying the alterations in genes and pathways that drive cancer progression or increase its risk, as well as identifying molecular subtypes of the disease, their markers, and relationship to clinical variables.

Liza Leshchiner is a Research Scientist in the Getz Lab, working on experimental and computational biology. Liza’s research interests are in the area of cancer biology and therapeutic science, with a focus on novel pathways and novel therapeutic strategies. Liza has a strong expertise in therapeutic proof-of-concept compound development for novel targets as a way to translate genomic and biologic findings, expand the “druggable” genome and challenge common therapeutic limitations.

Liza’s current projects are focused on (i) combining computational analysis with the experimental follow-up of novel pathways of cancer progression and resistance to treatment, in particular by epigenetic mechanisms; (ii) single-cell RNA-sequencing (experimental methods and analysis) to identify unique tumor cell populations and tumor therapeutic response/resistance.

Liza obtained her Ph.D. from Harvard University’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology/Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and was a postdoctoral fellow with Stuart Schreiber at Harvard University/Broad Institute.

David Pepin was trained as a molecular and developmental biologist at the University of Ottawa, Canada, where he completed a Ph.D. elucidating the role of chromatin remodeling during ovarian development and in ovarian cancers. In 2011, Dr. Pepin joined the Pediatric Surgical Research Laboratories as a Research Fellow at the Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston to continue his training in ovarian cancer research. In 2016 Dr. Pepin established is laboratory as an Assistant Professor in the Pediatric Surgical Research Laboratories of the Massachusetts General Hospital. His research focuses on women’s health and particularly female reproductive development, ovarian physiology, and ovarian cancer.

Dr. Wucherpfennig received his MD in 1986 and his PhD in 1987 from the University of Goettingen, Germany. He completed research fellowships at Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University. In 1995, he joined DFCI, where he is principally involved in basic laboratory research that focuses on T cell immunology and the role of T cells in cancer immunology. 

Dr. Wright is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and  Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.  She received her Medical Degree from University of Pennsylvania and completed a residency in Internal Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a Medical Oncology fellowship at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.   She also obtained a Masters in Public Health at the Harvard School of Public Health. In 2009 she joined the faculty of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, where she is a practicing medical oncologist who specializes in gynecologic oncology and health outcomes research.

Elizabeth M. Swisher, MD, is a gynecologic oncologist, UW School of Medicine professor and Co-Leader of the Breast and Ovarian Cancer Research Program at the Fred Hutchinson/University of Washington Cancer consortium. She has a research and clinical focus on the genetics and prevention of gynecologic cancers including novel therapeutics.

Dr. Swisher earned a B.S. from Yale University and received her M.D. from the University of California at San Diego. She completed her residency at the University of Washington in Ob/Gyn and a fellowship in gynecologic oncology at Washington University St Louis. She is board certified in gynecologic oncology and obstetrics and gynecology.

Dr. Swisher's clinical interests include gynecologic cancer, clinical trials, cancer prevention, cancer genetics, and novel therapeutics..

Dr. Swisher utilizes tumor information to make personalized treatment plans for each cancer patient. She is working to make genetic testing for cancer risk accessible to all women with and without cancer so that no woman dies of a preventable hereditary cancer.

Paula T. Hammond is Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Head of the Department of Chemical Engineering. She is a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, the MIT Energy Initiative, and a founding member of the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnology. The core of her work is the use of electrostatics and other complementary interactions to generate functional materials with highly controlled architecture. Her research in nanomedicine encompasses the development of new biomaterials to enable drug delivery from surfaces with spatio-temporal control. She also investigates novel responsive polymer architectures for targeted nanoparticle drug and gene delivery, and has developed self-assembled materials systems for electrochemical energy devices.

Professor Paula Hammond was elected into the National Academy of Science in 2019, the National Academy of Engineering in 2017, the National Academy of Medicine in 2016, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2013.   She is one of only 25 distinguished scientists elected to all three national academies.  She won the ACS Award in Applied Polymer Science in 2018, and she is also the recipient of the 2013 AIChE Charles M. A. Stine Award, which is bestowed annually to a leading researcher in recognition of outstanding contributions to the field of materials science and engineering, and the 2014 AIChE Alpha Chi Sigma Award for Chemical Engineering Research.   She was selected to receive the Department of Defense Ovarian Cancer Teal Innovator Award in 2013, which supports a single visionary individual from any field principally outside of ovarian cancer to focus his/her creativity, innovation, and leadership on ovarian cancer research. By developing degradable electrostatically assembled layer-by-layer (LbL) thin films that enable temporal and even sequential controlled release from surfaces, Paula Hammond pioneered a new and rapidly growing area of multicomponent surface delivery of therapeutics that impacts biomedical implants, tissue engineering and nanomedicine.  A key contribution is her ability to introduce not only controlled release of sensitive biologics, but her recent advances in actually staging the release of these drugs to attain synergistically timed combination therapies. She has designed multilayered nanoparticles to deliver a synergistic combination of siRNA or inhibitors with chemotherapy drugs in a staged manner to tumors, leading to significant decreases in tumor growth and a great lowering of toxicity. The newest developments from her lab offer a promising approach to messenger RNA (mRNA) delivery, in which she creates pre-complexes of mRNA with its capping protein and synthesized optimized cationic polypeptides structures for the co-complexation and stabilization of the nucleic acid-protein system to gain up to 80-fold increases in mRNA translation efficiency, opening potential for vaccines and immunotherapies.  Professor Hammond has published over 320 papers, and over 20 patent applications.  She is the co-founder and member of the Scientific Advisory Board of LayerBio, Inc. and a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Moderna Therapeutics.

Dr. D’Andrea received his Doctor of Medicine from Harvard Medical School in 1983. He completed his residency at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and a fellowship in pediatric hematology-oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Boston Children’s Hospital. He also completed a research fellowship at the Whitehead Institute of Biomedical Research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he cloned the receptor for erythropoietin, the major hormone for blood production. Dr. D’Andrea joined the Dana-Farber faculty in 1990. He is currently the Fuller-American Cancer Society Professor of Radiation Oncology at Harvard Medical School, the Director of the Center for DNA Damage and Repair, and the Director of the Susan F. Smith Center for Women’s Cancers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Dr. D’Andrea is internationally known for his research in the area of DNA damage and DNA repair. His laboratory also investigates the pathogenesis of Fanconi Anemia, a human genetic disease characterized by a DNA repair defect, bone marrow failure, and cancer predisposition.

A recipient of numerous academic awards, Dr. D’Andrea is a former Stohlman Scholar of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, a Distinguished Clinical Investigator of the Doris Duke Charitable Trust, a recipient of the E. Mead Johnson Award from the Society for Pediatric Research, a recipient of the G.H.A. Clowes Memorial Award from the American Association for Cancer Research, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the American Association for Cancer Research Academy, the National Academy of Medicine, and the National Academy of Sciences.

D'Andrea Lab 

Dr. Bast is Vice President for Translational Research at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center where he holds the Harry Carothers Wiess Distinguished University Chair for Cancer Research. His office facilitates translation of new strategies, drugs and devices from the laboratory to the clinic, as well as the movement of human material and data from the clinic to laboratory. He received his education at Wesleyan University, Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins Hospital, the National Cancer Institute, Peter Bent Brigham Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Before joining the MD Anderson faculty in 1994 he served on the faculties of Harvard Medical School and Duke University Medical Center where he was Director of the Duke Comprehensive Cancer Center. [Read More]

Dr. Odunsi is a gynecologic oncologist whose research focuses on understanding the mechanisms of immune recognition and tolerance in ovarian cancer and translating these findings to immunotherapy clinical trials. He pioneered the development of antigen-specific vaccine therapy and “next generation” adoptive T-cell immunotherapies to prolong remission rates in women with ovarian cancer. [Read More]

Dr. David Huntsman (MD, FRCPC, FCCMG) is the Dr. Chew Wei Memorial Professor of Gynaecologc Oncology, holds the Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Molecular and Genomic Pathology, and is a Professor in the Departments of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and Obstetrics and Gynaecology at UBC. He is also the co-Founder and Director of OVCARE, BC's multidisciplinary gynecologic cancer research team.  [Read More]

Panagiotis (Panos) A Konstantinopoulos, MD, PhD is Director of Translational Research and attending oncologist in the Division of Gynecologic Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. His translational research career focuses on ovarian cancer and other gynecologic malignancies with an important niche in the areas of DNA Damage and Repair and Immunotherapy. His work has focused on unraveling mechanisms of resistance to chemotherapy and targeted agents, developing the rationale and preclinical data for novel drug combinations in ovarian cancer, and on identification of novel diagnostic and predictive biomarkers of therapeutic response in gynecologic cancers as well investigating their mechanistic implication in carcinogenesis.  [Read More]