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Dr. Liz Jaffee’s research is focused on the development of novel vaccine approaches that overcome immune tolerance to cancers, and she currently holds six vaccine patents. She is an international leader in the development of immune based therapies for pancreatic and breast cancers.  In 1981, she graduated magna cum laude from Brandeis University before receiving her medical degree from New York Medical College. From 1985-1988 she completed her medical residency at Presbyterian-University Hospital in Pittsburgh, PA, and subsequently received a National Institutes of Health Research Training Grant as a research fellow and principal investigator at the University of Pittsburgh.  Dr. Jaffee came to the Johns Hopkins University in 1989 as Senior Clinical Oncology Fellow. In 1992, she joined the faculty as Assistant Professor of Oncology.Since her arrival at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Jaffee has become a renowned oncology researcher and co-director of both the Cancer Immunology Program and the Gastrointestinal Cancers Program. She also established Cell Processing and Gene Therapy cGMP Facility.

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Ashani Weeraratna’s laboratory focuses on trying to unravel the molecular mechanisms that lead to metastatic progression and therapy resistance. They are investigating the link between changes in the tumor microenvironment and melanoma progression, and further, how these changes may affect response to therapy. More recently, they have become very interested in how the aging microenvironment guides changes leading to increased metastasis and therapy resistance, as well as cell-autonomous aspects of therapy resistance, and have demonstrated that normal age-related changes in the microenvironment can contribute to multiple aspects of melanomagenesis and therapy resistance.

She is a professor and chair for the Biochemistry & Molecular Biology Department at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is also a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor.

Abstract to come

Alison Klein is is a professor of Oncology, Pathology and Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Medicine and a trained genetic epidemiologist/statistical geneticist. She is also the Director of the National Familial Pancreas Tumor Registry, the largest pancreatic cancer family registry in the world (www.nfptr.org). She is a genetic epidemiologist with a focus on cancer research. Her current work focuses on the identification the genetic and environmental risk factors for pancreatic cancer as well as other complex genetic diseases. Recently, in the first demonstration that whole exome sequencing approaches can be used to identify the causes of a hereditary disease, she discovered that mutations in the PALB2 gene increase the risk of pancreatic cancer. In addition, she has developed a clinical risk assessment tool for high-risk pancreatic cancer families, PancPRO in order to facilitate the translation of her research findings into the clinical setting.