Stephen J. Schuster, MD
Stephen J. Schuster, MD is the Robert and Margarita Louis-Dreyfus Professor of CLL and Lymphoma and a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the director of the lymphoma program and director of Lymphoma Translational Research at Abramson Cancer Center.
After graduating AOA from Jefferson Medical College and completing his residency at Pennsylvania Hospital, Dr. Schuster completed clinical and research fellowships at the Cardeza Foundation for Hematologic Research. In 1989, he became a member of the Cardeza Foundation at Jefferson Medical College.
Dr. Schuster joined the University of Pennsylvania in 1998. Since then, his research has focused on the development and application of novel immunotherapies for B-cell lymphomas and CLL, including autologous tumor-derived vaccines, autologous costimulated T-cells, radioimmunotherapy, monoclonal antibody therapy, and adoptive immunotherapy using chimeric antigen receptor modified T cells.
Dr. Schuster has received numerous awards for outstanding teaching and research. He has over 150 publications.
Carl H. June, MD
Carl June is the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. He is currently Director of the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies at the Perelman School of Medicine, and Director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a graduate of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, and Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, 1979. He had graduate training in Immunology and malaria with Dr. Paul-Henri Lambert at the World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland from 1978-79, and post-doctoral training in transplantation biology with E. Donnell Thomas and John Hansen at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle from 1983 - 1986. He is board certified in Internal Medicine and Medical Oncology. He maintains a research laboratory that studies various mechanisms of lymphocyte activation that relate to immune tolerance and adoptive immunotherapy for cancer and chronic infection. In 2011, his research team published findings detailing a new therapy in which patients with refractory and relapsed chronic lymphocytic leukemia were treated with genetically engineered versions of their own T cells. The treatment has also now also been used with promising results to treat children with refractory acute lymphoblastic leukemia. He has published more than 350 manuscripts and is the recipient of numerous prizes and honors, including election to the Institute of Medicine in 2012 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014, the William B Coley award, the Richard V Smalley Memorial Award from the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer, the AACR-CRI Lloyd J. Old Award in Cancer Immunology, the Philadelphia Award in 2012, the Taubman Prize for Excellence in Translational Medical Science in 2014 (shared w S. Grupp, B. Levine, D. Porter), the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize (shared w J. Allison), the Novartis Prize in Immunology (shared w Z. Eshaar and S. Rosenberg), the Karl Landsteiner Memorial award, the Debrecen Award and a lifetime achievement award from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.
Elise Chong, MD
Dr. Chong is a Fellow in Hematology/Oncology at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Chong graduated cum laude from Princeton University in 2007, then worked in lymphoma clinical research at the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania from 2007-2009. She received her M.D. from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in 2013. She then completed residency in Internal Medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in 2016.
During her time at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Chong's research has focused on modulation of the immune system to develop effective immunologic therapies for non-Hodgkin lymphomas. Her current focus has been on combining CAR T cell therapy and immune checkpoint inhibition to improve CAR T cell treatment responses. In other work, she demonstrated that that use of lenalidomide can overcome rituximab resistance and produce durable clinical responses in patients with B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma. To date, Dr. Chong has 18 peer-reviewed publications and has presented her work numerous times at national meetings.
Erle S. Robertson, Ph.D
Erle S. Robertson, Ph.D., has over 30 years of experience in Molecular Biology and over 2 decades of experience specifically in the field or viral oncology with a focus on oncogenic viruses and gammaherpesviruses. He completed his post-doctoral training in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at Harvard Medical School and an instructor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Division of Infectious Disease. He moved to the University of Michigan Medical School as an independent investigator in 1997. Dr. Robertson moved to Penn in 2002 and is the Director of Tumor Virology Training Program at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and is the Program Leader of the Tumor Virology program of the Abramson Comprehensive Cancer Center. He is also the director of the Cell Culture core of the UPenn Medicine/GI Center for Molecular and Digestive Diseases. He is vice-chair for research in Otorhinolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery and secondary appointments in Microbiology and Radiation Oncology. He has over 20 years of experience training undergraduate, graduate students and postdoctoral candidates in tissue culture, molecular biology techniques as well as design and implementation of scientific programs. He directs a lab with a focus on infectious agents and mechanisms of oncogenesis mediated by viral agents leading to development of cancer. He has broad expertise in viral oncology and investigates the role of tumor viruses and their regulation of tumor suppressors and metastatic suppressors by viral encoded antigens. He has developed reverse genetic strategies, and has been instrumental in developing strategies for identifying oncogenic viruses in a number of human cancers related to EBV and KSHV, and is currently investigating the mechanism of oncogenesis by these tumor viruses. Ongoing program efforts are based on identifying microbial signature patterns for major cancers with diagnostic potential,. He is also working on developing preclinical datasets for therapeutic compounds with specificity for viral associated cancers with the potential for moving into a phase 1 trial. He has published seminal works in EBV and KSHV field which demonstrates his experience over 22 years in the field of gammaherpesviruses. Most importantly, he has trained numerous post-doctoral fellows who have successfully moved to independent faculty positions throughout the world and is passionate about his contributions to the careers of junior investigators in the field of microbiology and cancer biology.
John Wherry, Ph.D.
Dr. John Wherry is a Professor in the Department of Microbiology in the Perelman School of Medicine. Dr. Wherry received his Ph.D. at Thomas Jefferson University in 2000 then went on to do his postdoctoral research at Emory University where he trained with Rafi Ahmed from 2000-2004. Dr. Wherry was appointed Assistant Professor in 2005 in the Immunology Program at The Wistar Institute and then joined the Penn's Microbiology Department in 2010.
Throughout his tenure at both the Wistar Institute and the PSOM Microbiology Department, Dr. Wherry had a strong involvement in the Immunology Graduate Group (IGG) and the larger immunology community. Dr. Wherry served as IGG Admissions Chair from 2006-2011 and then served as chair of the Immunology Graduate Group from 2011-2013. Dr. Wherry remains on the IGG Executive Committee and has mentored numerous graduate students within the IGG program and other graduate groups within the Biomedical Graduate Studies program. In October 2012, Dr. Wherry was appointed as Director of the Institute for Immunology (IFI), a Type-2 center whose mission is to advance our knowledge of the basic immunology of inflammation, autoimmunity, cancer, transplantation and infection and to translate this new knowledge to novel strategies for diagnosis, prevention and therapeutic intervention.
Dr. Wherry has received numerous distinctions for his consistent and significant contributions to infectious disease research. A major focus of the research in Dr. Wherry's laboratory is to understand the mechanisms of suboptimal CD8 T cell responses during chronic infections. In 2007, Dr. Wherry was selected as one of "America's Young Innovators-37 under 36" by the Smithsonian magazine and was appointed a member of the Faculty of 1000 in 2009. Dr. Wherry has over 100 publications in top international journals including Nature, Nature Immunology, Immunity, and the Journal of Immunology. His work has resulted in international recognition as evidenced by many invitations for seminars and extensive local and national service. The long-term goal of Dr. Wherry's laboratory is to develop approaches to reinvigorate the immune system in settings where it fails including chronic infections and cancer.
Mariusz A. Wasik, MD
Mariusz A. Wasik, MD, graduated from Wroclaw Medical University in Poland and completed fellowships in immunology at Harvard Medical School and Boston University, residency in pathology at Mallory Institute of Pathology/Boston University and fellowship in hematopathology at Beth Israel Hospital/Harvard. The key areas of his research are related to the oncogenic role of aberrant cell signaling and epigenetic gene silencing in lymphomas to understand better their pathogenesis, develop new diagnostic and monitoring tools, and novel therapies targeting the aberrantly activated signaling pathways and activating the epigenetically silenced tumor suppressor genes. His group has identified mTOR as therapeutic target in cancer and JAK-STAT as an oncogenic pathway in lymphomas. Using oncogenic tyrosine kinase ALK as a model, his lab established mechanistic links between oncogenesis and epigenetic silencing of tumor suppressors, immune evasion and overcoming effects of hypoxia by malignant cells.
He has authored more than 180 peer-reviewed articles, many as principal investigator in such journals as Nature Medicine, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Blood, American Journal of Pathology, Cancer Research and Journal of Immunology, among others. Dr. Wasik frequently serves as the member and chair of grant review panels for the National Institute of Health and other funding organizations.