Professor Benjamin Solomon MBBS, PhD, FRACP, FAHMS is a medical oncologist focused on clinical and translational research for lung cancer. He heads the lung Medical Oncology Service at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne, Australia. His clinical trial work focuses on the identification of novel therapies for lung cancer including novel targeted therapy and immunotherapy approaches. He has been involved in clinical trials with novel inhibitors of ALK, ROS1, NTRK, BRAF, cMET, RET and KRAS including the phase I though 3 trials with the ALK TKIs leading to approvals of crizotinib and lorlatinib and the approval of adjuvant alectinib. He has over 250 peer-reviewed publications with over 50,0000 citations and has been named a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher (2019-2024). He is a founding board member of the Thoracic Oncology Group of Australasia and is a Board Member of the Cancer Council of Victoria and the International Association for the study of Lung Cancer (IASLC).

Dr. Joan H. Schiller is widely published and internationally recognized for her work in  lung cancer clinical research. Dr. Schiller is also passionate about climate change and its  impact on health. She is the Co-Founder and Chair of the Steering Committee of  Oncology Advocate United for Climate and Health - International (OUCH-I), a non-profit  organization whose goal is to educate cancer health professionals and organizations  about the impact climate change has on cancer care, and to advance awareness,  actions, and policies that mitigate these effects. She has published numerous articles,  editorials, and opinion pieces on the effects of climate change and health in such  journals as JAMA Oncology; JCO Oncology Practice; Cancer Letter, IASLC Lung Cancer  News, and Journal of Thoracic Oncology. She has given multiple talks and webinars,  including for the European Society of Medical Oncology; American Thoracic Society,  Northwestern Memorial Hospital, University of Wisconsin, Houston Methodist Hospital,  and the Canadian Global Oncology Workshop, among others. 

Dr. Schiller has served as an editor for the Journal of Clinical Oncology; a board member  for the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer, and the principal  investigator on many national clinical trials for lung cancer. She also served as  chairperson of the Thoracic Oncology Committee of the Eastern Co-operative Oncology  Group for many years until stepping down from that position in 2012. Her research has  generated well over peer-reviewed 200 publications that she has authored or co authored, including articles, abstracts, book chapters, books, reviews and invited  manuscripts. 

Before serving as the Deputy Director of Clinical Investigation for the Inova Schar Cancer  Institute in Fairfax, Virginia, and Chief of Hematology/Oncology, she was the division  chief of Hematology/Oncology at the University of Texas-Southwestern Medical Center  and Deputy Director of the Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center in Dallas, where she  held the Andrea L. Simmons Distinguished Chair in Cancer Research.  

Dr. Schiller graduated from the University of Illinois Medical School and completed her  internship and residency in internal medicine at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in  Chicago. She then completed a clinical fellowship in the Department of Human Oncology at the University of Wisconsin Comprehensive Cancer Center where she became the  Melanie Heald Professor in the Department of Medicine, Section of Medical Oncology,  and subsequently served as head of the Lung Cancer Program at the University of  Wisconsin Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Dr. Schiller is also the founder and President of Free to Breathe, a national advocacy  organization aimed at raising awareness and funding for lung cancer, which recently merged with Lung Cancer Research Foundation, of which she is a Board member.

Dr Camidge’s main clinical and research interests are thoracic malignancies and developmental therapeutics. The discoveries he and his team have made have changed the standard of care for the treatment of lung cancer multiple times. He has authored over 300 academic publications, including in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology, Lancet Oncology, and New England Journal of Medicine. He has received numerous awards, including, in 2012, the Bonnie J. Addario International Lectureship Award for which he was credited as a ‘Luminary in the quest to eradicate lung cancer’.

In 2013, he became the first physician to receive the Hank Baskett Sr. Spirit Award, for which he was credited as being ‘one of the leading minds in lung cancer today’. In 2014, he was nationally recognized by The Quality of Life Center at Claremont University in California as an ‘Exemplary mentor in the positive development of junior colleagues in the profession’. In 2016, the Lung Cancer Foundation presented him with the Breath Away From The Cure Award, describing him as ‘Simply one of the best in treating lung cancer today’. 

Every year since 2017, he has been internationally recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher, ranked in the top 1% of all of Clinical Medicine by Clarivate Analytics Web of Science. Every year from 201,9, he has ranked at the ‘World Expert’ level by Expertscape for scholars writing about Lung Neoplasms over the past 10 years.

He is also the National Medical Director of the Academic Thoracic Oncology Medical Investigators Consortium (ATOMIC) – a collaborative network of 16 US and Canadian sites conducting trials in thoracic oncology, Co-chair of the Elsevier ClinPath (formerly VIA) Oncology Lung Cancer Pathways Committee and a past-member of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network Lung Cancer Committee. 

Upal oversees LUNGevity’s research awards program, including the monitoring and evaluation of the research projects as well as implementing and managing LUNGevity’s patient-focused research. Upal has extensive experience in community-based participatory research (CBPR) methodology in health sciences research, specifically in projects involving immigrants and minority populations. His experience ranges from working with diabetes education for Asian immigrants in New York City to educating minority populations about breast cancer screening in Queens, NY.

Upal has a PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of Arizona, and an MPH in Global Health Policy and Management from New York University.

Prior to joining LUNGevity as Director of Patient-Focused Research, Bellinda worked at the US Food and Drug Administration Oncology Center of Excellence on the Patient-Focused Drug Development team. There, Dr. King-Kallimanis worked on the development and launch of Project Patient Voice, a resource for patients and caregivers, along with their healthcare providers, to look at patient-reported symptom data collected from cancer clinical trials.

Dr. King-Kallimanis also has experience in industry and academia and has published over 60 peer-reviewed papers that cover disease areas like lung cancer, depression, cognitive impairment, and multiple sclerosis. She received her Bachelor of Social Science and master of Science in Applied Statistics from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, and her PhD in psychometrics from the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

My primary research interest, along with my clinical work, focuses on improving cancer care for vulnerable patient populations, particularly patients who are members of ethnic and racial minority groups, and those who are economically disadvantaged. I am particularly interested in evaluating delays in diagnosis, the unique disease characteristics and survivorship issues faced by patients with lung cancer, and the power of intersectionality regarding race, gender, sexual orientation, and social determinants of health in these vulnerable populations. My interest in healthcare disparities dates to my first research project as a medical student. Then, I worked with the Dominican Republic Health Department to improve access to healthcare for the children of Haitian immigrants and developed a state-wide campaign to increase their vaccination rates. Throughout my subsequent years of training, I developed an extensive research portfolio focused on equitable cancer care screening and delivery, patient-reported outcomes, sex and racial differences in response and tolerability to cancer therapies, as well as historically understudied topics such as sexual health in women with lung cancer. I have also advocated for the inclusion of women, older adults, and racial, sexual, and gender minorities in oncology clinical trials, and have collaborated with large institutions and government agencies to modify clinical trials' exclusion criteria through an evidence-based approach that is tailored to the unique needs of various patient populations. As junior faculty, I continue to utilize diversely sampled data to inform large-scale interventions to address barriers present in our clinical environment affecting aspects of the cancer continuum from diagnosis to survivorship, with the ultimate goal of providing high-quality, tailored care for ALL patients. 

Over the last three years, I have established national and international collaborations with leading hospital-based research institutions, lung cancer foundations, and advocacy groups to explore historically understudied topics and address the unique issues faced by patients with lung cancer. In the summer of 2020, we launched the Sexual Health Assessment in Women with Lung Cancer (SHAWL) Study in conjunction with the GO2 Foundation for Lung Cancer; this international effort is the largest study evaluating sexual health in women with lung cancer to date, recruiting 249 participants across the globe. SHAWL was presented at the 2022 World Conference on Lung Cancer in Vienna, Austria and has received national and international news coverage. Strikingly, our study showed that 77% of study participants were facing moderate to sexual dysfunction, with marked differences before and after lung cancer diagnoses. In addition, during my time at the University of Wisconsin, we created the first clinic in the Midwest dedicated to women with lung cancer. This clinic rapidly grew, receiving referrals from eleven different states across the region and at the 2021 World Conference on Lung Cancer, the clinic was awarded the North American Cancer Care Team Award for exceptional clinical care. 

In 2023, I launched the first study to prospectively evaluate the feasibility of using the ePRO-CTCAE™ to assess patient-reported adverse events and evaluate sex and racial differences among individuals receiving immunotherapy for NSCLC. Study results will serve as preliminary data to standardize the implementation of the ePRO-CTCAE assessment across large NCTN clinical trials. Furthermore, in collaboration multi-institutions, I am currently leading an investigation to assess the feasibility of a novel EGFR plasma cfDNA screening tool among historically marginalized East Asian and Hispanic populations at elevated risk for EGFRm-NSCLC and who would otherwise be ineligible for routine lung cancer screening. This study seeks to provide critical insights regarding testing feasibility that also have the potential to expand current screening guidelines to adopt cfDNA genotyping as a genomic screening tool that precedes diagnostic confirmation with imaging, and tissue sampling.

Further, I am the Associate Director of The Cancer Care Equity Program at Dana-Farber institute; in this position, I have developed relationships long-lasting relationships with communities in Boston and surrounding areas and continue to expand the program's research portfolio. Specifically, I oversee the Community-Based Cancer Diagnostic Clinic, where I first-hand experience the many barriers experience by vulnerable populations while seeking medical care. I also active evolved in community education efforts and training of the next generation of healthcare providers and researchers. In addition, I am the leader and founder of the Florez Laboratory, a research group focused on lung cancer health disparities and social justice issues in medicine, including discrimination & gender bias in academic and clinical medicine. The Florez laboratory has received research funding from several national agencies, published over fifty studies and editorials, and presented research findings at national and international conferences. My clinical and research experience in cancer-related age, gender, race, and class disparities, as well as in medical education, allow for a unique perspective and the ability to conduct national and international studies on oncology clinical trials, lung cancer, patient reported outcomes, and social justice. 

Coral Olazagasti, MD is an assistant professor at the Sylvester Cancer Center, University of Miami at Miami, Florida. Dr. Olazagasti earned her medical degree from the Universidad Central del Caribe from Bayamon, Puerto Rico. She relocated to New York City to pursue an Internal Medicine residency at Mount Sinai Beth Israel. After completing her medical residency training, Dr. Coral Olazagasti worked as an academic hospitalist for Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Boston, MA before pursuing a Hematology-Oncology training at Northwell Health in New York. She is currently a medical oncologist at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center with a focus on head and neck and thoracic malignancies.
 
Dr. Olazagasti is a passionate advocate of early detection and lung cancer screening. Additionally, as a Latina oncologist, Dr. Olazagasti is personally invested in the study of disparities in cancer care in racial and ethnic minorities. She has drawn on her own experiences to highlight the inequities and barriers that minority patients face in healthcare. Dr. Olazagasti combines both interests, and she focuses lung cancer screening in racial and ethnic minorities, especially the Hispanic population. She hopes to continue to expand her research passions and help promote early detection and close the gap for minorities and vulnerable populations.
 

Sandip Patel, MD is a Professor at UCSD and a Medical Oncologist focusing on early phase clinical trials of immunotherapy and thoracic oncology.  He is the leader for the Experimental Therapeutics (Phase 1) Program and co-leader of the Solid Tumor Therapeutics Program at UCSD Moores Cancer Center.

He is Deputy Director for the Sanford Stem Cell Clinical Institute.  He is also co-leader of the NRG Developmental Therapeutics Committee and Medical Director of Clinical Research Informatics at UCSD.

Luis Corrales, MD, is a medical oncologist and Director at the Centro de Investigación y Manejo del Cáncer (CIMCA) in San José, Costa Rica. 

He obtained his medical degree at the Universidad de Costa Rica and completed his Medical Oncology residency program at the same university in 2009. He then pursued a Thoracic Oncology Fellowship at Hôpital Notre-Dame from the Centre Hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal (CHUM) in Montreal, Canada. 
He returned to Costa Rica, joining the faculty at Hospital San Juan de Dios and becoming a pre-graduate and post-graduate professor at the Universidad de Costa Rica. He is the director and leading investigator for Costa Rica of several international clinical trials at CIMCA. 

He is a member of the Asociación Costarricense de Oncología Médica (ACOMED), Consorcio Latinoamericano para la Investigación del Cáncer de Pulmón (CLICaP), Oncology Latin America Association (OLA), ASCO, ESMO, and IASLC. 
  
He has co-authored numerous abstracts and peer-reviewed publications. His interests include translational medicine, molecular biology, targeted therapies, and immune-oncology applied to thoracic, gastrointestinal, and breast oncology, among others.

As Director of Government Affairs, Brandon amplifies the impact of LUNGevity’s policy and advocacy efforts by identifying and analyzing the legislative proposals that directly affect patients with and at risk for lung cancer.

Before joining LUNGevity, Brandon served as Associate Director of Congressional Relations at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), where he led the organization’s outreach to Congress and managed multiple legislative activities. Previously, Brandon served as Vice President of Strategic Initiatives at Men’s Health Network, leading policy and advocacy activities for the organization. He has also held positions with the Foundation for Sustainable Development and the Office of the Governor of Virginia.

As Associate Director of Constituent Engagement, Lauren works with various constituent groups and partners to create and fulfill opportunities for meaningful engagement. She builds and deepens LUNGevity's relationships with hospitals, healthcare providers, advocacy organizations, and community partners to facilitate collaboration and strategic partnerships. 

Before joining LUNGevity, Lauren worked in the higher education, event management, and publishing industries.  

Lauren received her BS in Business Communications from Stevenson University and her MS in Communications Management from Towson University. She completed a Women in Leadership certificate program at Cornell University and an executive education program in Accelerating Innovation in Precision Medicine at Harvard University. 

Ann spent over 30 years working in oncology nursing, patient care policy, and clinical operations. As a thoracic nurse/nurse navigator at the University of North Carolina, she became attuned to patient needs along their lung cancer journey, and as the former director of clinical operations at Biologics at McKesson, Ann directed and implemented patient management programs.

Multidisciplinary care of cancer patients became Ann’s passion and she published and spoke nationally to groups on establishing, staffing, and maintaining multidisciplinary cancer clinics for 14 years.