Rebecca Heist is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an attending physician at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center. She received her undergraduate degree from Harvard University and her MD from Harvard Medical School, and subsequently trained in residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and oncology fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute / Mass General.  She is a member of the Termeer Center for novel cancer therapeutics at MGH and is actively involved in early phase clinical trials in lung cancer. She has led international clinical trials in MET altered lung cancer and her research has been published in journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Clinical Oncology, and the Journal of Thoracic Oncology.

Following a PhD in Molecular Biology at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge University, UK, Dr Camidge completed his medical training at Oxford University, UK. He then became the first person to double train in Medical Oncology and Clinical Pharmacology in the UK, before joining the University of Colorado, USA from October 2005.

The Colorado Multidisciplinary Thoracic Oncology Program is internationally recognized. Over 20% of it’s in-person patients travel from outside of Colorado, the highest of any program in the cancer center and separate from the even greater reach of the program’s ground-breaking national and international remote second opinion program. Included in the program are three thoracic surgeons, three thoracic radiation oncologists, three thoracic pathologists/molecular pathologists, three thoracic radiologists, three pulmonologists (running the pulmonary nodule clinic) and six thoracic medical oncologists (with the support of two medical oncology NPs, clinic nurses, a dietician, a social worker and an embedded PharmD). The program has direct faculty representation across UCHealth linked sites at Highlands Ranch, LoneTree and Cherry Creek and close relations with the UCHealth oncology practitioners treating thoracic cancers across the network.

The central Program accrues 40% of its lung cancer patients onto clinical trials, approximately double that of the next best NCI cancer center and ten times the national average.

Dr Camidge’s main areas of clinical and research interest are thoracic malignancies and developmental therapeutics. The discoveries he and the Colorado team have made have changed the standard of care for the treatment of lung cancer multiple times. He has authored over 250 academic publications, including in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology, Journal of Clinical Oncology, Lancet Oncology, and New England Journal of Medicine. He has presented his work at numerous national and international meetings.

In 2012 he received the Bonnie J. Addario International Lectureship Award as a ‘Luminary in the quest to eradicate lung cancer’. In 2013 he became the first physician to receive the Hank Baskett Sr. Spirit Award, for which he was credited as being ‘one of the leading minds in lung cancer today’. In 2014, he was nationally recognized by The Quality of Life Center at Claremont University in California as an ‘Exemplary mentor in the positive development of junior colleagues in the profession’. In 2016, the Lung Cancer Foundation presented him with the Breath Away From The Cure Award describing him as ‘Simply one of the best in treating lung cancer today’.

Every year from 2017, he has been internationally recognized as a highly cited researcher ranked in the top 1% of all of Clinical Medicine by Clarivate Analytics Web of Science. In 2019 and 2020 he was ranked at the ‘World Expert’ level by Expertscape and recognized to be in the top 0.0043% of scholars writing about Lung Neoplasms over the past 10 years. He is also the National Medical Director of the Academic Thoracic Oncology Medical Investigators Consortium (ATOMIC), Co-chair of the Elsevier ClinPath (formerly VIA) Oncology Lung Cancer Pathways Committee and a past-member of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network Lung Cancer Committee.

 

Dr. Mark Awad is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Clinical Director of the Lowe Center for Thoracic Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard University and his MD and PhD degrees from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He completed his residency and chief residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and his medical oncology fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute before joining the Dana-Farber faculty in 2014. His translational research focus is on identifying biomarkers of response and resistance to targeted therapies and immunotherapies in lung cancer. He is the principal investigator of several clinical trials for patients with thoracic malignancies and collaborates closely with laboratory-based investigators. His research has been published in journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Cancer Immunology Research, and the Journal of Thoracic Oncology.

He is a recipient of the 2015 Young Investigator Award from the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), the 2015 Young Investigator Award from the International Association for the Society of Lung Cancer (IASLC), the 2017 Career Development Award from Conquer Cancer Foundation of ASCO, and the 2018 ALK Positive/LUNGevity Transformational Research Award.