After graduating Medical School (2008) Myriam Chalabi did her residency in internal medicine/medical oncology. In 2016 she became staff member at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam as a Gastrointestinal Oncologist and clinician scientist. In 2022 she was named one of the 11 early career researchers to watch by Nature Medicine.

She is the lead investigator (PI) of several neoadjuvant immunotherapy trials in gastrointestinal cancers, including the globally renowned NICHE study, in which patients with colon cancers were found to have impressive responses after a short duration of neoadjuvant immunotherapy. Her research focuses on early innovative combination immunotherapy trials with a strong focus on translational research to better understand the drivers of response in these tumors and find novel immunotherapy combinations. Her main goal is to improve immunotherapy for patients with gastrointestinal cancers.

Marcus Goncalves is a physician scientist at NYU Langone Health in beautiful New York City. His lab is focused on the effects of diet and cancer on the host tissues that regulate systemic nutrient metabolism. As a practicing endocrinologist, he has helped to develop therapeutic and dietary strategies to modulate systemic glucose and insulin levels in patients with obesity, diabetes, and cancer. MG’s clinical practice focuses on the care of patients with metabolic diseases like insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, low testosterone, and complications from cancer and cancer therapy like cachexia.

Dr. Arabella Young, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology and Investigator at the Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah. Following graduate training in tumor immunology at the University of Queensland, she performed her postdoctoral studies at the Diabetes Center at the University of California San Francisco.

Dr. Young’s research aims to improve our understanding of the interaction between different immune-mediated diseases, which have the potential to influence treatment outcomes for patients with cancer. Her lab has established syngeneic tumor models in autoimmune-prone mice to improve mechanistic understanding of the relationship between anti-tumor immunity and immunotoxicity in response to cancer immunotherapies. Additionally, she is advancing modeling approaches that incorporate the impact of medication exposure for comorbidities alongside cancer immunotherapy efficacy, in an effort to optimize treatment outcomes for patients.

Tullia C. Bruno, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Immunology at the University of Pittsburgh and a faculty member in the Tumor Microenvironment Center and the Cancer Immunology and Immunotherapy Program at the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center. She obtained her Ph.D. in Immunology from Johns Hopkins in 2010 and completed her postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Colorado in 2015—both with a focus in tumor immunology. While Dr. Bruno’s PhD training focused on inhibitory receptors on intertumoral T cells, she became interested in the role of B cells and tertiary lymphoid structures (TLS) in the tumor microenvironment (TME) during her postdoctoral fellowship and has built her independent research program around understanding intertumoral B cell and TLS function in multiple human cancers and physiologically relevant murine models. Because Dr. Bruno’s research lab has an overt focus on studying immunity within cancer patients, her research is highly translational with the potential for future clinical trials targeting B cells and TLS. Finally, given Dr. Bruno's cutting-edge work on analyzing TLS with multispectral imaging and spatial transcriptomics, she is becoming an emerging leader for spatial biology techniques. Dr. Bruno is actively involved in the UPMC Hillman community, and is an advocate for women in science, as is evidenced by her previous role as chair of the UPMC Hillman Women's Initiatives Taskforce and her contributions to the Society of Immunotherapy's Women in Immunotherapy group.

Dr. Pardoll is the Abeloff Professor of Oncology, Medicine, Pathology and Molecular Biology and Genetics at the Johns Hopkins University, School of Medicine.  He is the Director of the Bloomberg~Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy and Co-Director of the Cancer Immunology Program at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins. 

Dr. Pardoll attended Johns Hopkins University, where he earned his M.D., Ph.D., in 1982 and completed his Medical Residency and Oncology Fellowship in 1985. He then worked for three years at the National Institutes of Health as a Medical Staff Fellow. Dr. Pardoll joined the departments of oncology and medicine in 1988. Dr. Pardoll has published over 300 papers as well as over 20 book chapters on the subject of T cell immunology and cancer vaccines. He has served on the editorial board of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute and Cancer Cell, and has served as a member of scientific advisory boards for the Cancer Research Institute, the University of Pennsylvania Human Gene Therapy Gene Institute, Biologic Resources Branch of the National Cancer Institute, Harvard-Dana Farber Cancer Center, Cerus Corporation, Global Medical Products Corporation, Genencor Corporation, CellGenesys Corporation, Mojave Therapeutics, the American Association of Clinical Oncology and the American Association of Cancer Research.

Dr. Pardoll has made a number of basic advances in Cellular Immunology, including the discovery of gamma - delta T cells, NKT cells and interferon-producing killer dendritic cells.  Over the past two decades, Dr. Pardoll has studied molecular aspects of dendritic cell biology and immune regulation, particularly related to mechanisms by which cancer cells evade elimination by the immune system. He is an inventor of a number of immunotherapies, including GVAX cancer vaccines and Listeria monocytogenes based cancer vaccines. Dr. Pardoll’s basic immunology discoveries include the identification of gd-T cells, NKT cells and IKDC. He elucidated the role of Stat3 signaling in tumor immune evasion and in Th17 development, leading to the discovery that Stat3-driven Th17 responses promote carcinogenesis. Dr. Pardoll discovered one of the two ligands for the PD-1 inhibitory receptor and leads the Hopkins cancer immunology program that developed PD-1 pathway-targeted antibodies, demonstrating their clinical activity in multiple cancer types.

His more than 300 articles cover cancer vaccines, gene therapies, cancer prevention technologies, recombinant immune modulatory agents for specific pathways that regulate immunity to cancer and infectious diseases.