Internal Advisory Board

Barbara Burtness, MD is Professor of Medicine (Medical Oncology) at the Yale School of Medicine, Chief Translational Research Officer, and Associate Cancer Center Director for Translational Research at the Yale Cancer Center. She serves as Co-Leader of the Developmental Therapeutics Program, Division Chief for Head and Neck/Sarcoma Oncology, and Director of the Yale Head and Neck Specialized Program of Research Excellence. Dr. Burtness is internationally recognized for her research in head and neck cancer. She chairs the ECOG-ACRIN Cooperative Group Head and Neck Cancer Therapeutics Committee and the ECOG-ACRIN Task Force for the Advancement of Women, and leads national and international trials of targeted therapy in head and neck cancer. Her laboratory studies synthetic lethal therapeutic strategies in head and neck cancer and the targeting of aurora kinase A to overcome adaptive resistance to EGFR inhibition and - in lung cancer- to direct KRAS inhibition.

Radiation oncologist Peter M. Glazer, MD, PhD, is the chair of the Department of Therapeutic Radiology. He has dedicated his career to helping cancer patients receive the highest quality of care available in a supportive environment.“When patients are undergoing radiotherapy for cancer, it can be a sensitive and challenging time for them and their families,” he says. “Our team does everything possible to keep our patients safe and comfortable throughout treatment.” Dr. Glazer makes it his priority to provide patients seeking care at Smilow Cancer Hospital and its Care Centers with the most advanced technologies and evidence-based treatments. “We take great pride in giving our physicians the best tools to treat cancer,” he says.As a professor of both therapeutic radiology and genetics at Yale School of Medicine, Dr. Glazer researches new therapeutic strategies for treating cancer and the role of altered DNA repair in tumor progression. His research was recently recognized by the National Cancer Institute of the NIH with a prestigious Outstanding Investigator Award of $7 million that will support his efforts to develop novel DNA repair inhibitors for cancer therapy.

Dr. Halene is a physician-scientist who received her MD degree at Eberhardt-Karls-University in Tübingen, Germany. She subsequently completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Donald B. Kohn at CHLA in Los Angeles and her residency in internal medicine in the traditional program at Yale New Haven Hospital. She completed her fellowship in hematology/oncology at Yale and joined the ladder faculty at YSM as an assistant professor in 2010. At that time she was also named director of the Hematology Tissue Bank for Yale Cancer Center. She was promoted to associate professor in 2016 and subsequently served as interim chief of the Section of Hematology prior to her appointment as chief of that section in 2020. Her laboratory studies hematopoiesis and myelopoiesis and in particular how mutations in splicing factors and perturbations in RNA modifications contribute to hematologic malignancies such as myelodysplasia and leukemia. Dr. Halene, in collaboration with the Flavell laboratory in the YSM Department of Immunobiology, has developed the first efficient xenotransplantation model in humanized mice to study myelodysplasia and enable testing of novel drug treatments. Dr. Halene’s research has garnered significant attention from the international community, as evidenced by numerous invited speaking engagements, an invitation to serve as a section editor on myeloid malignancies for a major journal, and publications in top tier journals in her field. In 2015 she was presented with the Sir William Osler Young Investigator Award and in 2019 was elected a member of the Interurban Clinical Club. Dr. Halene is director of the DeLuca Center for Innovation in Hematology Research. Through generous funding from The Frederick A. DeLuca Foundation, the center has established a comprehensive biospecimen bank, awarded pilot and career development grant funding to advance cutting-edge discoveries in hematologic malignancies and classical hematologic disorders. Meet Dr. Stephanie Halene>>

Dr. Kunz is an international leader in the treatment and clinical research of patients with GI malignancies and neuroendocrine tumors (NETs). She holds several leadership positions in the field including President Emeritus of the North American Neuroendocrine Tumor Society, recent past Chair of the Neuroendocrine Tumor Taskforce of the National Cancer Institute, and member of the FDA’s Oncology Drug Advisory Committee. She also currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief for JCO Oncology Advances. In addition to her focus on NETs, she is a leading voice for promoting diversity, equity and inclusion in medicine. She served as the Vice Chief of DEI for the Section of Medical Oncology at Yale School of Medicine and, in 2021, she was awarded ‘Woman Oncologist of the Year’ by Women Leaders in Oncology for her work in promoting gender equity.Learn more about Dr. Kunz >>

Mark Lemmon, PhD, FRS is the Alfred Gilman Professor of Pharmacology, and Co-Director of Yale Cancer Biology Institute. He returned to Yale as a named Professor of Pharmacology in 2015 after 19 years on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. At Penn, he was the George W. Raiziss Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics as well as Chair of the department and an Investigator at the Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute. Dr. Lemmon was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society (the UK's national academy) in 2016, and has been honored with the Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin Award of the Protein Society and the Stanley N. Cohen Biomedical Research Award from the University of Pennsylvania. He is on the Editorial Advisory Boards of several journals, including Cell and Molecular Cell, and is Chair of the Editorial Board of the Biochemical Journal. Dr. Lemmon’s research focuses on understanding the signaling networks controlled by receptor tyrosine kinase (RTK) growth factors that, when mutated, cause cancers and other diseases. His laboratory combines biochemical, structural, biophysical, and cellular approaches to investigate how these networks function, and also collaborates with clinical groups to apply the mechanistic lessons learned to inhibitor choice and combating development of resistance to targeted therapies in the clinic.

Markus Müschen, MD-PhD, is the Director of the Center of Molecular and Cellular Oncology, Arthur H. and Isabel Bunker Professor of Hematology, and Professor of Immunobiology at Yale University. He also serves as Chief of the Division of Basic Science of Yale Cancer Center. His research program focuses on signal transduction mechanisms in lymphoid malignancies and how these pathways can be intercepted for the treatment of drug-resistant leukemia and lymphoma. His laboratory established new conceptual frameworks for the understanding of B-cell signaling and energy metabolism and how these mechanisms are altered in lymphoid malignancies. Markus Müschen studied medicine at the Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Germany, Université de Nantes, France and the Institut Pasteur, Paris, France. After his clinical training in hematology-oncology with Volker Diehl at the University of Cologne, he completed postdoctoral fellowships in immunology with Klaus Rajewsky and Ralf Küppers and in leukemia genetics with Janet D. Rowley at the University of Chicago. Before coming to Yale, Markus Müschen’s laboratory was at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF, 2010-2017) where he served as Program Leader of the Hematological Malignancies Program at the UCSF Comprehensive Cancer Center. Markus Müschen is currently a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Faculty Scholar, an elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation, the Connecticut Academy of Science and the Scientific Advisory Board of the Lymphoma Research Foundation. His research has been supported by an NCI Outstanding Investigator Award (R35) since 2016. As Director of the Center of Molecular and Cellular Oncology at Yale, he serves as mentor for nine junior faculty. Müschen Laboratory Drug Discovery platform: http://lymphoblasts.org/