The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is a public land-grant research university in San Francisco, California. It is part of the University of California system and is dedicated entirely to health science and life science. It conducts research and teaching in medical and biological sciences.
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.
Stephen Michael Hahn is an American physician who served as the commissioner of food and drugs from 2019 to 2021. Before becoming commissioner, he was an oncologist serving as chief medical executive of the MD Anderson Cancer Center. In 2021, he became chief medical officer at Flagship Pioneering, the venture capital firm that launched Moderna.
The Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC), previously known as the International Society for Biological Therapy of Cancer (iSBTc), is a professional society of scientists, academicians, researchers, clinicians, government representatives, and industry leaders from around the world dedicated to improving outcomes in patients with cancer by advancing the science and application of cancer immunotherapy. Currently, SITC has more than 2,400 members, representing 22 medical specialties from 42 countries around the world, who are engaged in the research and treatment of cancer.
Ashutosh K. Tewari is the chairman of urology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. He is a board certified American urologist, oncologist, and principal investigator. Before moving to the Icahn School of Medicine in 2013, he was the founding director of both the Center for Prostate Cancer at Weill Cornell Medical College and the LeFrak Center for Robotic Surgery at NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital. Dr. Tewari was the Ronald P. Lynch endowed Chair of Urologic Oncology and the hospital's Director of Robotic Prostatectomy, treating patients with prostate, urinary bladder and other urological cancers. He is the current President of the Society for Urologic Robotic Surgeons (SURS) and the Committee Chair of the Prostate Program. Dr. Tewari is a world leading urological surgeon, and has performed over 10,000 robotically assisted procedures using the da Vinci Surgical System. Academically, he is recognized as a world-renowned expert on urologic oncology with over 250 peer reviewed published papers to his credit; he is on such lists as America's Top Doctors, New York Magazine's Best Doctors, and Who's Who in the World. In 2012, he was given the American Urological Association Gold Cystoscope Award for "outstanding contributions to the field of urologic oncology, most notably the treatment of prostate cancer and the development of novel techniques to improve the outcomes of robotic prostatectomy."
Jonathan W. Simons is an American physician-scientist, medical oncologist, and leader in prostate cancer research. In August 2021, Simons was appointed the medical director and Chief Science Officer of the Marcus Foundation. Prior to joining the Marcus Foundation, he served a 14-year tenure as the President and chief executive officer of the Prostate Cancer Foundation. Simons’ laboratories, partly funded by the Prostate Cancer Foundation, at Johns Hopkins University and Emory University made original contributions to understanding the molecular biology of prostate cancer metastasis and principles of “broken immune tolerance” via T cell based immunotherapy for prostate cancer. The Simons lab invented GM-CSF genetically engineered vaccines for prostate cancer in rodents and humans for these studies, and subsequently Simons’ clinical team took the biotechnology into the world’s first human gene therapy clinical trials for advanced prostate cancer at Johns Hopkins.
Charles L. Sawyers is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator who holds the Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Chair of the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program (HOPP) at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK). HOPP is a program created in 2006 that comprises researchers from many disciplines to bridge clinical and laboratory discoveries.
Alan Ashworth, FRS is a British molecular biologist, noted for his work on genes involved in cancer susceptibility. He is currently the President of the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of California, San Francisco, a multidisciplinary research and clinical care organisation that is one of the largest cancer centres in the Western United States. He was previously CEO of the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) in London.
Hedvig Hricak was born in 1946, in Zagreb, SR Croatia, SFR Yugoslavia and earned her MD degree from the School of Medicine, University of Zagreb in 1970. She was Chairman of the Department of Radiology, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center from November 1999 to January 2023. She is professor of radiology at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University.
Griffith Rutherford Harsh IV is an American neurosurgeon, Professor of Neurological Surgery at the University of California, Davis, and former Julian R. Youmans Endowed Chair of the department. Dr. Harsh also led the UC Davis School of Medicine and UC Davis Health faculty as Chair of the Council of Department Chairs. Currently, he maintains his academic appointment at UC Davis and holds visiting professorships at the University of Nairobi and Kenyatta University, while living in Nairobi with his wife, Meg Whitman, the US Ambassador to Kenya.
Anil Potti is a physician and former Duke University associate professor and cancer researcher, focusing on oncogenomics. He, along with Joseph Nevins, are at the center of a research fabrication scandal at Duke University. On 9 November 2015, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) found that Potti had engaged in research misconduct. According to Potti's voluntary settlement agreement with ORI, Potti can continue to perform research with the requirement of supervision until year 2020, while he "neither admits nor denies ORI's findings of research misconduct." As of 2024 Potti, who is employed at the Cancer Center of North Dakota, has had 11 of his research publications retracted, one publication has received an expression of concern, and two others have been corrected.
UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital is a children's hospital system in San Francisco and Oakland, California, affiliated to the University of California, San Francisco. The hospital is a quaternary research and teaching hospital, and is the largest public recipient of NIH funding worldwide for 17 consecutive years, with $789,196,651 in total funding for FY 2023. A quaternary care hospital is the highest designation for facilities that can treat the most complex and specialized conditions. It has three campuses: the Parnassus Heights Campus, the Mount Zion Campus, and the Mission Bay Campus, and three UCSF Affiliates: the UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital Oakland, the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, as well as the San Francisco VA Medical Center. The research campus within the Mission Bay Campus has over one million GSF of research space, in addition to the over one million GSF hospital complex, compromised of the Benioff Children's Hospital, Betty Irene Moore Women's Hospital, Gateway Medical Building, and the UCSF Bakar Precision Cancer Medicine Building.
Leor S. Weinberger is an American virologist and quantitative biologist. He is credited with discovering the HIV virus latency circuit, which provided the first experimental evidence that stochastic fluctuations ('noise') in gene expression are used for cell fate decisions. He has also pioneered the concept of therapeutic interfering particles, or “TIPs”, which are resistance-proof antivirals. His TED talk on this novel antiviral approach 20 years in the making has been called a "highlight" of TED and received a standing ovation from the live audience.
The UCSF School of Medicine is the medical school of the University of California, San Francisco and is located at the base of Mount Sutro on the Parnassus Heights campus in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1864 by Hugh Toland, it is the oldest medical school in California and in the western United States.
Laura Esserman is a surgeon and breast cancer oncology specialist. She is the director of the Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine. She leads the I-SPY trials, Athena Breast Health Network and the WISDOM study. Esserman is an inductee in the Giants of Cancer Care, 2018, for Cancer Diagnostics and the "less is more" approach. She performs live in the show "Audacity" which she co-created. She is also known as the "singing surgeon" for singing to her patients as they go under anesthesia.
Anant Madabhushi is the Donnell Institute Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in Cleveland, Ohio, USA and founding director of CWRU's Center for Computational Imaging and Personalized Diagnostics (CCIPD). He is also a Research Scientist at the Louis Stokes Cleveland Veterans Administration (VA) Medical Center in Cleveland, OH, USA. He holds secondary appointments in the Case Western Reserve University departments of Urology, Radiology, Pathology, Radiation Oncology, General Medical Sciences, Computer & Data Sciences, and Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering.
UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center is an NCI-designated Cancer Center, affiliated with the UCSF School of Medicine and the UCSF Medical Center. It is one of 69 cancer research institutions in the United States supported by the National Cancer Institute, and one of three in Northern California. The HDFCCC integrates basic and clinical science, patient care, and population science to address prevention and early detection of cancer as well as the quality of life following diagnosis and treatment.
Hope S. Rugo is professor of medicine and the director of the breast oncology clinical trials program at the University of California at San Francisco, and an investigator of SPORE in the Bay Area.
Electron Kebebew is an American surgeon, educator and scientist. Kebebew is currently the Harry A. Oberhelman Jr. and Mark L. Welton Professor and Chief of General Surgery at Stanford University.
Eric. J. Small is an American medical oncologist specializing in urologic oncology, with a focus on prostate cancer. He currently serves as the co-leader of the UCSF Prostate Cancer Program and the Deputy Director and Chief Scientific Officer at the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center. Additionally, he is the President-Elect of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO).
