(left to right) Geoffrey Girnun, PhD, John Haley, PhD, Joel Saltz, MD, PhD, Chia-Hsin (Lori) Chan, PhD, Scott Powers, PhD, Samuel Ryu, MD
Our patients benefit from the newest treatments, developed by physician-scientists who are the best in their fields. The Stony Brook Cancer Center is pleased to welcome six new stellar faculty members to our team.
Samuel Ryu, MD—a pioneer in radiosurgery of tumors of the spine and spinal cord—is Stony Brook Medicine’s new Chair of Radiation Oncology and Deputy Director for Clinical Affairs at the Cancer Center. He is principal investigator of several clinical trials to increase effectiveness of radiosurgery for brain and spinal cord tumors and reduce the toxicity of treatments for these cancers. Dr. Ryu will launch a new Radiation Oncology residency program here. He comes to Stony Brook from Detroit, where he was Director of the Center for Radiosurgery in the Josephine Ford Cancer Institute.
Dr. Ryu has been voted one of America’s Best Doctors (Castle Connolly), and one of America’s Top Oncologists by the Consumers’ Research Council. He is author of the book Spine Radiosurgery, and has penned 17 book chapters and 111 peer-reviewed scholarly publications on radiation of brain and spinal tumors.
Joel Saltz, MD, PhD, is the inaugural Cherith Professor and founding chair of Stony Brook’s new Department of Biomedical Informatics. He is associate director for informatics at the Cancer Center, and vice president for informatics of Stony Brook Medicine. Dr. Saltz will lead Stony Brook’s emerging emphasis on using biomedical informatics to explore the origins of diseases and their responses to treatment. He comes to us from Emory University, where he was chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics.
Dr. Saltz has developed computational methods and tools that are used in integrative, translational research in pathology, imaging and cancer medicine. In clinical research, he has developed informatics techniques that give a better understanding of health care quality-related outcomes, such as patient readmissions to hospitals. This understanding—obtained by mining the information available in patient medical histories, clinical lab tests, scans, and pathology samples—drives better medical decisions.
Chia-Hsin (Lori) Chan, PhD joins us through a joint recruitment effort by the Cancer Center and Stony Brook’s Department of Pharmacological Sciences. Her research has uncovered leads in the mysteries of metastasis and cancer stem cell emergence. These studies led to the development of novel and exciting therapeutics, for which a patent has been applied and clinical trials are being pursued. To support Dr. Chan’s work, the Cancer Center acquired the IVIS Lumina III, an advanced imaging instrument for studying tumors, bone density, blood vessels and much more.
Dr. Chan earned a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at top-ranked National Taiwan University, then undertook postdoctoral studies at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.
Geoffrey Girnun, PhD joins us through joint recruitment effort by the Cancer Center and the Department of Pathology. He will serve as the Director of Cancer Metabolomics for the Cancer Center and Associate Professor of Pathology. He completed his PhD in 2000 in Free Radical and Cancer Biology at the University of Iowa and his postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Dr. Bruce Spiegelman at Harvard Medical School and the Dana Farber Institute in 2003. Prior to joining our department, Dr. Girnun held faculty appointments at the Dana Farber and most recently, in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at the University of Maryland. Dr. Girnun’s research is currently focused on the metabolic control of hepatocellular carcinoma by PGC1 alpha and he is also investigating PPAR gamma coactivation in obesity and colon cancer.
John Haley, PhD joins us through joint recruitment efforts by the Department of Pathology and the Cancer Center. He will serve as Director of Developmental Therapeutics in the Cancer Center and Associate Professor of Pathology.
Dr. Haley earned a PhD in Molecular Endocrinology from the Howard Florey Institute for Experimental Physiology and the University of Melbourne and completed postdoctoral research fellowships at the Howard Florey Institute in Melbourne and at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund and the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in London. He returned to the U.S. to join Oncogene Science Inc. as Program Manager for Cancer Therapeutics and was subsequently recruited to OSI Pharmaceutical Inc. in 1992. At OSI, Dr. Haley served as Senior Director for Exploratory Cancer Research, Senior Research Director for Translational and EMT Research, and Senior Research Director for Discovery Research. His strong academic background, as well as the depth of his experience in the Pharmaceutical industry, has uniquely qualified him to foster partnerships with peer institutions and with biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, with the vision of developing novel approaches to cancer therapies at Stony Brook Medicine.
Scott Powers, PhD joins us as a Professor and in the Department of Pathology and the Director of Clinical Cancer Genomics in the Cancer Center.
Dr. Powers earned his PhD in Biological Sciences at Columbia University and completed a postdoctoral research fellowship, supported by the Leukemia Society of America, at the Cold Spring Harbor Biology Laboratory. He was subsequently recruited to a faculty appointment in the Department of Biochemistry at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in 1988. Dr. Power’s subsequently held several positions in the Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical Industries, holding senior leadership positions at Onyx Pharmaceuticals, Amplicon Corporation, and Tularik Genomics. Dr. Powers returned to academia in 2004, as Director of the Human Genome Center at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
Over the course of his career at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, Dr. Powers advanced the field of genomics in cancer research by defining the transforming properties of enzymes and genes in breast, ovarian and prostate malignancies, and by identifying genetically linked transcriptional factors that cooperate to transform cells in lung cancer. To translate genomics research related to potential therapeutic targets, Dr. Powers integrated cancer genome profiling with focused cDNA and RNAi screens to systematically search for driver genes and therapeutic targets. His current research utilizes next-gen sequencing approaches to develop new cancer diagnostics, including single cell genomics to investigate the origins of cancer and their response to treatments.
Dr. Power’s research has been supported by numerous grants from the National Cancer Institute and other federal sources; he is currently the Primary Investigator of a multi-institutional U01 award to support the application of genomics to developmental therapeutics. He holds many US patents, he has authored nearly 90 manuscripts related to genomic changes in cancer that have been published in high impact journals, and he chairs an important National Cancer Institute Study Section. His strong academic background, as well as the depth of his experience in the Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical industries have uniquely qualified him to continue to make important research contributions through research in his own lab while also serving as a resource to the members of our academic community, through his service as the Cancer Center Director of Clinical Cancer Genomics at Stony Brook Medicine.