The American Association for Cancer Research has named personalized breast cancer treatment expert Jose Baselga as its new president-elect. Baselga, physician-in-chief at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, will become president-elect this coming April and assume the presidency in April 2015.
Baselga has been involved with AACR for two decades in many capacities, including as a member of the board of directors from 2009 to 2012. He is a leader of the Stand Up To Cancer Dream Team: Targeting the PI3K Pathway in Women’s Cancers. Before joining MSKCC, Baselga headed the division of hematology/oncology at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, and was a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston.
Additionally, AACR also elected five new members to its board of directors, including James Allison, chair of the immunology department at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center; Ronald Evans, chair of molecular and developmental biology at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies; Scott Lippman, director of the University of California, San Diego Moores Cancer Center; Guillermina Lozano, chair of the department of genetics at MD Anderson; and M. Celeste Simon, scientific director at the Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute, University of Pennsylvania.
Kathy Giusti, founder and CEO of the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation, has received Research!America's 2014 Gordon and Llura Gund Leadership Award for advancing the research and treatment of multiple myeloma. Giusti was recently honored at the 2014 Advocacy Awards at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, DC, for her innovative work in creating collaborative research models that incorporate genomic and other clinical information from multiple myeloma patients.