Leadership Type: Scientific Advisory Board

Louis Weiner, MD, is director of Georgetown University’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, a National Cancer Institute (NCI)-designated comprehensive cancer center. He holds the Francis L. and Charlotte G. Gragnani Chair and is professor of oncology and chair of the Department of Oncology at Georgetown University Medical Center. He also serves as the Director of the MedStar Georgetown Cancer Institute, a cancer service line serving patients in the Washington, D.C., and Baltimore metropolitan areas. He is responsible for the operation and development of the cancer center, including its research, clinical and educational missions. The clinical mission includes leading the MedStar Georgetown Cancer Institute in the metropolitan Washington area. Weiner is known for his laboratory and clinical research focusing on new therapeutic approaches that mobilize the patient’s immune system to fight cancer using monoclonal antibodies and other modalities of therapy. His current research focuses on identifying and therapeutically exploiting mechanisms employed by malignant cells to combat immune destruction.

Prior to joining Georgetown Lombardi as director in 2008, Weiner served as chairman of the medical oncology department and vice president for translational research at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, Pa., and also served as professor in the department of medicine at Temple University School of Medicine. He is an active member of the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), and founded the AACR Cancer Immunology Working Group. He has served as chair of the NCI Board of Scientific Counselors for Clinical Sciences and Epidemiology and as a member of the NCI Clinical Trials Advisory Committee (CTAC). He also served on the NCI’s blue ribbon panel working group on immunotherapy for the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative and the Advisory Panel of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Center for Scientific Research (CSR), which administers NIH research grants. He is recipient of the 2019 AACR Distinguished Public Service Award.

Weiner earned his bachelor’s degree in biology with honors from the University of Pennsylvania and his MD from Mount Sinai School of Medicine. After completing his internship, residency and service as chief medical resident at the University of Vermont’s Medical Center Hospital, he held clinical and research fellowships in hematology and oncology at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston.

Victor Nizet is a Distinguished Professor of Pediatrics, Vice Chair for Basic Research, and Chief of the Division of Host-Microbe Systems & Therapeutics at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine and Distinguished Professor at UCSD Skaggs School of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences. A graduate of Reed College, Dr. Nizet received his medical training at Stanford University School of Medicine, completed a Residency and Chief Residency in Pediatrics at Harvard University’s Children’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, and then a Fellowship in Pediatric Infectious Diseases at the University of Washington’s Children’s Hospital in Seattle. Dr. Nizet is Faculty Lead for the UCSD Collaborative to Halt Antibiotic-Resistant Microbes (CHARM), a multidisciplinary research and educational program that debuted in 2019. Dr. Nizet has authored over 500 peer-reviewed publications and has collaborated with several biotechnology interests in developing new antibiotic and immune-based therapies against drug-resistant pathogens.

Joseph Schlessinger has been the William H. Prusoff Professor and Chairman of the Department of Pharmacology at Yale University School of Medicine since 2001. He was the Director of the Skirball Institute for Biomolecular Medicine at New York University (NYU) Medical Center from 1998-2001 and the Milton and Helen Kimmelman Professor and Chairman of the Department of Pharmacology at NYU Medical School from 1990-2001. He was a member of the Weizmann Institute from 1978-1991 and the Ruth and Leonard Simon Professor of Cancer Research in the Department of Immunology from 1985-1991. Joseph Schlessinger was a Research Director for Rorer Biotechnology from 1985-1990. He founded Sugen, Inc. in 1991, Plexxikon in 2001, and Kolltan in 2008.

Joseph Schlessinger received a B.Sc. degree in Chemistry and Physics in 1968 (magna cum laude), and a M.Sc. degree in chemistry (magna cum laude) in 1970 from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He obtained a Ph.D. degree in biophysics from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1974. From 1974-1976, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Departments of Chemistry and Applied Physics at Cornell University, and from 1977-1978, he was a visiting fellow in the immunology branch of the National Cancer Institute of NIH.

Schlessinger received the Michael Landeau Prize (1973), Sara Leady Prize (1980), Hestrin Prize (1983), Levinson Prize (1984), Ciba-Drew Award (1995), Antoine Lacassagne Prize (1995), The Distinguished Service Award of Miami Biotechnology (1999), Honorary Membership of the Japanese Biochemical Society (1999), Taylor Prize (2000), Honorary Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Haifa (2002) the Medal of Danica Hrvatska Order, Republic of Croatia (2009), and the Penzcoller Foundation-AACR International Award for Cancer (2010).

He is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) (1982), a member of the National Academy of Sciences (2000), a fellow of Neuroscience Research Program (2000), a member of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2001), a member of the European Academy of Sciences (2004), a member of the Academy of Sciences (2005), a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences (2006), and a foreign member of the Croation Academy of Sciences (2008). He is serving on the editorial boards of numerous journals including Cell and Molecular Cell.

Dr. Cravatt is Professor and Norton B. Gilula Chair of Chemical Biology in the Department of Chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute. His research group is interested in developing chemical proteomic technologies that enable protein and drug discovery on a global scale and applying these methods to characterize biochemical pathways that play important roles in human physiology and disease.  Dr. Cravatt obtained his undergraduate education at Stanford University, receiving a B.S. in the Biological Sciences and a B.A. in History.  He then received a Ph.D. from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) in 1996.   Professor Cravatt joined the faculty at TSRI in 1997. Dr. Cravatt’s honors include a Searle Scholar Award, the Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry, a Cope Scholar Award, the ASBMB Merck Award, the RSC Jeremy Knowles Award, the AACR Award for Achievement in Chemistry in Cancer Research, the Wolf Prize in Chemistry, and memberships in the National Academies of Medicine and Sciences.

Mitchell Kronenberg received a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology and was on the faculty of the UCLA School of Medicine (1986-1997).  He joined the La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) and served as LJI President (2003-2021).  He is currently the LJI Chief Scientific Officer.  Dr. Kronenberg’s research interests include innate-like T cells, the regulation of mucosal immunology and the pathogenesis of inflammatory bowel disease. He has co-authored approximately 400 publications, is an ISI highly cited investigator, and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a Distinguished Fellow of the American Association of Immunologists, and recipient of an NIH MERIT award. He is an advisor to many non-profit organizations including the Board of Scientific Counselors of the US National Cancer Institute, as well as biotech companies.

As associate vice chancellor for computational health sciences, Jill Mesirov, PhD, is responsible for the overarching strategy for data science and research computing for health sciences at UC San Diego School of Medicine. She is also a professor in the Department of Medicine.

Dr. Mesirov is a computational scientist who has spent many years working in the area of high-performance computing on problems that arise in science, engineering, and business applications. Her research focuses on cancer genomics applying machine-learning methods to functional data derived from patient tumors. The lab analyzes this molecular data to determine the underlying biological mechanisms of specific tumor subtypes, to stratify patients according to their relative risks of relapse, and to identify candidate compounds for new treatments.

In addition, Dr. Mesirov is committed to the development of practical, accessible software tools to bring these methods to the general biomedical research community. Her tools have been used by over 900,000 investigators worldwide.

Before joining UC San Diego in 2015, Dr. Mesirov was associate director and chief informatics officer at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she directed the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Program. She previously served as manager of computational biology and bioinformatics in the Healthcare/Pharmaceutical Solutions Organization, director of research at Thinking Machines Corporation, and has also held positions in the mathematics department at the University of California, Berkeley and served as associate executive director of the American Mathematical Society.

Dr. Mesirov received her BA in mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania and earned her MA and PhD in mathematics from Brandeis University.

She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Mathematical Society (AMS), the Association for Women in Mathematics, and the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB).

Christian Metallo is a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and holds the Daniel and Martina Lewis Chair. He is also an adjunct professor of bioengineering at UC San Diego. His laboratory integrates engineering approaches, stable isotope tracing, mass spectrometry, and molecular biology tools to dissect how metabolic dysregulation contributes to human disease. Key focus areas include cancer, macular disease, neurodegeneration, and diabetes. Christian received his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before starting his lab at UC San Diego in 2011. He was the recipient of a Searle Scholar Award and a Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, and he is a fellow in the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.