Andrea Califano is an American biologist. He is a Clyde and Helen Wu professor of Chemical and Systems Biology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. He also has roles in the Departments of Biochemistry & Molecular Biophysics, Biomedical Informatics, and Medicine.
Califano earned his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Florence, Italy, in 1986. He then joined the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, [1] where he became the program director of the IBM Computational Biology Center in 1997. He joined Columbia University in 2003. [2]
Califano serves on various editorial and scientific advisory boards, including the Board of Scientific Advisors of the National Cancer Institute, [3] St. Jude Children's Hospital, Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, [4] and Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc.. [5] He is also the co-founder and Chief Scientific Advisor of DarwinHealth. [6]
Califano is renowned for his work in reverse engineering gene regulatory networks and analyzing them to identify key tumor checkpoint modules. [7] This research has led to several clinical trials, including an N-of-1 study that analyzes patients with 14 untreatable, lethal cancers individually to prioritize therapeutic strategies. [8]
Harold Eliot Varmus is an American Nobel Prize-winning scientist. He is currently the Lewis Thomas University Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and a senior associate at the New York Genome Center.
John E. Niederhuber was the 13th director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), from 2006 until July, 2010, succeeding Andrew von Eschenbach, who went on to become a director at biotechnology firm BioTime. A nationally renowned surgeon and researcher, Dr. Niederhuber has dedicated his four-decade career to the treatment and study of cancer - as a professor, cancer center director, National Cancer Advisory Board chair, external advisor to the NCI, grant reviewer, and laboratory investigator supported by NCI and the National Institutes of Health. He is now Executive Vice President/CEO Inova Translational Medicine Institute and Inova Health System and co-director, Johns Hopkins Clinical Research Network.
Aviv Regev is a computational biologist and systems biologist and Executive Vice President and Head of Genentech Research and Early Development in Genentech/Roche. She is a core member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and professor at the Department of Biology of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Regev is a pioneer of single cell genomics and of computational and systems biology of gene regulatory circuits. She founded and leads the Human Cell Atlas project, together with Sarah Teichmann.
Bruce William Stillman is a biochemist and cancer researcher who has served as the Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) since 1994 and President since 2003. He also served as the Director of its NCI-designated Cancer Center for 25 years from 1992 to 2016. During his leadership, CSHL has been ranked as the No. 1 institution in molecular biology and genetics research by Thomson Reuters. Stillman's research focuses on how chromosomes are duplicated in human cells and in yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae; the mechanisms that ensure accurate inheritance of genetic material from one generation to the next; and how missteps in this process lead to cancer. For his accomplishments, Stillman has received numerous awards, including the Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. Prize in 2004 and the 2010 Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize, both of which he shared with Thomas J. Kelly of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, as well as the 2019 Canada Gairdner International Award for biomedical research, which he shared with John Diffley.
Waun Ki Hong was Professor of Medicine at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, where he served as chairman of the Department of Thoracic/Head & Neck Medical Oncology from 1993 to 2005 and as head of the Division of Cancer Medicine from 2001 to 2014. He was also an American Cancer Society Professor and the Samsung Distinguished University Chair in Cancer Medicine emeritus.
Dana Pe'er, Chair and Professor in Computational and Systems Biology Program at Sloan Kettering Institute is a researcher in computational systems biology. A Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator since 2021, she was previously a professor at Columbia Department of Biological Sciences. Pe'er's research focuses on understanding the organization, function and evolution of molecular networks, particularly how genetic variations alter the regulatory network and how these genetic variations can cause cancer.
Jill P. Mesirov is an American mathematician, computer scientist, and computational biologist who is the Associate Vice Chancellor for Computational Health Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. She previously held an adjunct faculty position at Boston University and was the associate director and chief informatics officer at the Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
Blossom Damania is a virologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is known for her work on oncogenic viruses that cause human cancer. Damania has also been serving as vice dean for research at the UNC Chapel Hill School of Medicine since 2016.
Professor Carol L. Prives FRS is the Da Costa Professor of Biological Sciences at Columbia University. She is known for her work in the characterisation of p53, an important tumor suppressor protein frequently mutated in cancer.
Curtis. C. Harris is the head of the Molecular Genetics and Carcinogenesis Section and chief of the Laboratory of Human Carcinogenesis at the Center for Cancer Research of the National Cancer Institute, NIH.
Elizabeth M. Jaffee is an American oncologist specializing in pancreatic cancer and immunotherapy.
Cynthia Wolberger is an American structural biologist currently at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. On April 19, 2019, she was elected as a member of the National Academy of Science among 100 new members and 25 foreign associates. She received her undergraduate degree in Physics from Cornell University in 1979 and her Ph.D. in Biophysics at Harvard University in 1987. She completed postdoctoral work at the University of California, San Francisco (1987-1989) and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (1989-1991). Her research concentrations include structural biology, ubiquitin signaling, and transcription regulation. Significant progress has been made by Wohlberger in understanding the structural biology of gene and protein control.
William Raymond Pearson is professor of biochemistry and molecular Genetics in the School of Medicine at the University of Virginia. Pearson is best known for the development of the FASTA format.
Dafna Bar-Sagi is a cell biologist and cancer researcher at New York University School of Medicine. She is the Saul J. Farber Professor in the department of biochemistry and molecular pharmacology and the department of medicine and senior vice president and vice dean for science at NYU Langone Health. Bar-Sagi has been a member of scientific advisory boards, including the National Cancer Institute, Starr Cancer Consortium, and Pancreatic Cancer Action Network.
Kornelia Polyak is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and an internationally recognized breast cancer expert.
Richard D. Klausner is an American scientist who served as the 11th director of the National Cancer Institute of the United States.
Gustavo A. Stolovitzky is an Argentine-American computational systems biologist. He was the CSO of Sema4 and then of GeneDx until December 2023. Between 1998 and 2021 he was a researcher and executive at IBM Research. At IBM he served in several roles including founding chair of the Exploratory Life Sciences Council and director of the Translational Systems Biology and Nano-Biotechnology Program at IBM Research. From 2013 to 2018 he was Adjunct professor of Genetics and Genomic Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and from 2007 he has been an Adjunct Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University. His research has been cited more than 29,000 times
Karen E. Knudsen is Chief Executive Officer of American Cancer Society and its advocacy affiliate the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network. She is the first woman to hold that position in either organization.
W. Kimryn Rathmell is an American physician-scientist whose work focuses on the research and treatment of patients with kidney cancers. She is the 17th Director of the National Cancer Institute, having previously served as the Hugh Jackson Morgan Professor and Chair of the Department of Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), and Physician-in-Chief for Vanderbilt University Adult Hospital and Clinics in Nashville, Tennessee. On November 17, 2023, Rathmell was nominated by President Biden as the next Director of the National Cancer Institute and she assumed office on December 18, 2023.
Lisa M. Coussens is an American cancer scientist who is Professor and Chair of the Department of Cell, Developmental and Cancer Biology and Deputy Director for Basic and Translational Research in the Knight Cancer Institute at the Oregon Health & Science University. She served as 2022-2023 President of the American Association for Cancer Research.