by Leigh MacMillan
Renowned surgical oncologist and clinician scientist Nita Ahuja, MD, MBA, chair of the Department of Surgery at Yale School of Medicine, will deliver the next web-based Discovery Lecture.
Ahuja will present “Epigenetics: Reprogramming Cancer’s “On” Switch” on Thursday, Feb. 24, at 4 p.m. via Zoom. All participants need to register in advance to receive the webinar instructions.
Ahuja, who is also Surgeon-in-Chief at Yale New Haven Hospital, chair of the Yale Medicine Faculty Practice Plan and interim director of Yale Cancer Center, is internationally recognized for the management of gastrointestinal cancers and sarcomas and for her seminal research in cancer epigenetics (the modification of gene expression).
Her early research led to the identification of the CpG island methylator phenotype (CIMP), which has implications for prognosis in multiple cancers. More recently, she and her team have explored how epigenetic modifications can be used to develop targeted therapies and predictive biomarkers for aggressive colorectal and pancreatic tumors.
Ahuja joined Yale School of Medicine in 2018 as the first female chair of the Department of Surgery. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and has authored more than 200 papers and book chapters in the fields of both clinical surgery and translational science.
Ahuja’s lecture is sponsored by Vanderbilt Supporting Careers in Research for Interventional Physicians and Surgeons (SCRIPS). For a complete schedule of Discovery Lectures, archived video of previous lectures, and the webinar registration link, go to https://www.vumc.org/dls/.
