Alan Ashworth, PhD, assumed his new role as director of the University of California, San Francisco, Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center this month, replacing Frank McCormick, PhD. Ashworth is the former chief executive of the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) in London, UK. He has made major contributions to cancer research through his studies on genes involved in cancer risk, and he was part of the team that discovered BRCA2 in 1995. A professor of molecular biology, he worked at the ICR for nearly 30 years.
D. Gary Gilliland, MD, PhD, became president and director of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, WA, on January 2. Formerly the vice president of precision medicine at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia, he replaces Lawrence Corey, MD. Gilliland also served as an executive at Merck Research Laboratories and as professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA, for more than 20 years. He has made seminal discoveries that have shed light on the genetic basis of leukemia and other blood cancers.
In November, Candace S. Johnson, PhD, was promoted to cancer center director at Roswell Park Cancer Institute (RPCI) in Buffalo, NY. In her new role, she will manage the institute's Cancer Center Support Grant from the NCI as its principal investigator and will oversee faculty recruitment and allocation of resources, including space, personnel, and institutional funds. Johnson conducts research on the role of vitamin D in reducing cancer risk, and has worked to grow immunotherapy and genomics research at RPCI. She has been RPCI's deputy director since 2008.
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