Vice Chair for Clinical Research, Department of Pediatrics
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
I currently serve as the Vice Chairman for Clinical Research within the Department of Pediatrics at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK Kids) and co-Leader of the Lisa and Scott Stuart Center for Adolescent and Young Adult Cancers at MSK. Prior to this, I accumulated nearly 20 years of experience leading a highly productive pediatric developmental therapeutics and early drug development program at Columbia University focused on relapsed and refractory solid tumors and biomarkers predictive of response and relapse. My primary translational work has been on the clinical development of targeted agents which inhibit growth pathways and manipulate the tumor microenvironment. More recently, my research has focused on the clinical implementation of precision oncology and deciphering how genomics can inform individual therapy choices. I have provided broad scientific leadership for early phase clinical trial development sponsored by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the Children’s Oncology Group (COG), as well as smaller disease-oriented consortia and pharmaceutical industry. I serve as consultant to the Pediatric Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee (ODAC) of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), sit on the Steering Committee for the Pediatric NCI-MATCH (Pediatric Molecular Analysis for Therapy Choice), and most recently serve as COG lead investigator for the ECOG-ACRIN-NCI-ComboMATCH. I have chaired, co-chaired or vice chaired 14 national phase trials and strive to involve young investigators in the leadership of early phase studies as a mechanism to train the next generation of translational clinical scientists. My clinical practice revolves around relapsed, refractory and high risk solid tumors and more specifically, adolescents and young adults (AYA) with sarcoma.