The International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer Announces New Additions to Board of Directors
DENVER – Dr. Heather Wakelee, professor of medicine in the Division of Oncology at Stanford University, has been elected the new president-elect of the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC). She is joined by new board members Dr. Andrea Bezjak, Dr. Roy Herbst, Dr. Erik Thunnissen and Dr. Caicun Zhou. All candidates will work to support the IASLC’s mission to conquer lung and thoracic cancers worldwide.
The newly-elected board members will officially assume their roles at the upcoming IASLC 2019 World Conference on Lung Cancer (WCLC) in Barcelona, Spain, on September 7-10, 2019. President-elect, Dr. Wakelee, will serve a two-year term while each of the four additional board members will serve a four-year term.
“We look forward to harnessing the talent, leadership and vision of this group of leaders in lung cancer and other thoracic malignancies,” said Giorgio Scagliotti, MD, PhD, president of the IASLC. “Having them deeply involved in strategy and leadership will undoubtedly benefit our entire organization, allowing us to expand our reach, solidify our relevance and provide our members with the world-class experience that they deserve.”
Dr. Heather Wakelee is a professor of medicine in the Division of Oncology at Stanford University and is the faculty director of the Stanford Cancer Clinical Trials Office. She is a graduate of Princeton University and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and completed her post-graduate training at Stanford University. She has authored or co-authored more than 200 medical articles on lung cancer and other thoracic malignancies, including thymic malignancies, and has been involved in dozens of clinical trials related to lung cancer therapy and diagnostics. Her research focuses on several lung cancer mutant subtypes such as EGFR, ALK, ROS1, RET, BRAF and others. She is also involved in trials of adjuvant therapy, immunotherapy and anti-angiogenesis agents - in addition to collaborations with colleagues focused in biomarkers and population science research. She is passionate about mentorship and is proud of the many former trainees who are now working in faculty positions as lung cancer investigators and care providers.
Dr. Andrea Bezjak is a professor in the Departments of Radiation Oncology and Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the University of Toronto, and staff radiation oncologist at Princess Margaret Hospital. Her clinical expertise is in the management of lung cancers and palliative radiotherapy. In August 2003, she assumed leadership of the Radiation Medicine Program (RMP) Lung Group and has created a multi-professional team that has embarked on a program of high precision radiotherapy in lung cancer, utilizing the cutting-edge technology now available within RMP including 4 D-CT for treatment planning, PET-CT simulator for target definition and cone beam CT for image verification. She is the local principal investigator of the RTOG phase I/II study of stereotactic RT for T1-T3NO non-small cell lung cancers in medically inoperable patients. She is also collaborating with colleagues in assessing the effect of radiotherapy on normal tissues, particularly lung.
Dr. Roy Herbst is Ensign Professor of Medicine, professor of parmacology, chief of medical oncology, director of the Thoracic Oncology Research Program, and associate director for Translational Research at Yale Cancer Center (YCC) and Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, Conn. For several decades, Dr. Herbst has been a pioneer of personalized medicine and immunotherapy, identifying biomarkers and bringing novel targeted treatments and immunotherapies to patients, and serving as principal investigator for numerous clinical trials testing these agents in advanced stage lung cancers. Dr. Herbst has authored or co-authored more than 300 publications, including peer-reviewed journal articles, abstractsand book chapters. For his lifetime achievement in scientific contributions to thoracic cancer research, Dr. Herbst was awarded the 2016 Paul A. Bunn, Jr. Scientific Award by the IASLC at the association’s 17th World Conference on Lung Cancer in Vienna, Austria.
Dr. Erik Thunnissen is a consultant pathologist at the Department of Pathology, VUmc, Amsterdam. His main interest is in pulmonary pathology, and as a long-standing member of the IASLC and the IASLC pathology committee, he leads reproducibility studies of the World Health Organization classification for lung cancer. He has taken responsibility for pulmonary molecular external quality assessment (EQA) programs initially in the Netherlands, subsequently in the European Society of Pathology, recently for UK NEQAS ICC & ISH, an international external quality assessment and technical advice/education service for laboratories.
Dr. Caicun Zhou is director of the Department of Oncology, Shanghai Pulmonary Hospital, director of Cancer Institute of Tongji University Medical School, chairman of the Oncology Department of Tongji University. He is also the head of Chinese East-West Lung Cancer Research Group in China. He studied in Japan for two years and was a visiting scientist in United States. He serves on the editorial boards of many scientific journals, including Tumor, Chinese-German Journal of Clinical Oncology and the Chinese Journal of Clinical Oncology. He is also an associate editor of ‘Lung Cancer’ and editor-in-chief of Translational Lung Cancer Research. Professor Zhou was selected as an ‘excellent learning pioneer’ by the Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality in 2006 and a leading talent of Shanghai in 2015 and received grants from the National 863 project and five key research projects of the Natural Science Foundation of China. His major research interests are in customized, targeted and immune therapy of lung cancer, and he has published over 100 papers in scientific journals.
About the IASLC:
The International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) is the only global organization dedicated solely to the study of lung cancer and other thoracic malignancies. Founded in 1974, the association's membership includes more than 7,500 lung cancer specialists across all disciplines in over 100 countries, forming a global network working together to conquer lung and thoracic cancers worldwide. The association also publishes the Journal of Thoracic Oncology, the primary educational and informational publication for topics relevant to the prevention, detection, diagnosis and treatment of all thoracic malignancies. Visit www.iaslc.org for more information.
