Meet the Organizers

Ravi Salgia, MD, PhD, is Chair of Medical Oncology & Therapeutics Research at City of Hope National Medical Center, in Duarte, California. Dr. Salgia also holds the Arthur and Rosalie Kaplan Chair in Medical Oncology. Previously, Dr. Salgia was Professor of Medicine, Pathology and Dermatology, and the Director of the Thoracic Oncology Program, and Aerodigestive Tract Program Translational Research at the University of Chicago. His research interests focus on novel therapeutics against lung cancer. Dr. Salgia has been honored with numerous awards, including being named one of the Top Doctors in America and awarded the Sun Pharma Distinguished Scientist Award (Clinical Sciences). Prior to his tenure at University of Chicago School of Medicine, Dr. Salgia was faculty at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. He earned his undergraduate summa cum laude in mathematics, biology, and chemistry, and then his MD and PhD degrees from Loyola University in Chicago, IL, where he also completed fellowships in neurochemistry and physiology. He continued his postgraduate training with an internship and residency in internal medicine at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, MD, followed by a fellowship in medical oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, MA, during which time he also served as a clinical fellow at Harvard Medical School in Boston. Dr. Salgia maintains a strong interest in chaos theory and fractals and their application to cancer, especially lung cancer.

Prakash Kulkarni, Ph.D., is Research Professor and Director of Translational Research in the Department of Medical Oncology and has a courtesy appointment in the Department of Systems Biology at the City of Hope National Medical Centre in Duarte, California. After receiving his PhD in biochemistry from India, he did postdoctoral training in biochemistry at the Indian Institute of Science and in cell biology at the New York University School of Medicine. He was an Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine where he was named the Irene and Bernard L. Schwartz Scholar of the Patrick Walsh Fund. He then moved to the W. M. Keck Laboratory for Structural Biology, University of Maryland Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology Research, as a Research Associate Professor. Prior to joining Johns Hopkins, Prof. Kulkarni held Staff Scientist positions in the Division of Chemistry & Chemical Engineering, the Division of Biology at Caltech, and in the Department of Genetics at Yale University School of Medicine. His research interests are interdisciplinary and are focused on understanding at a system level how conformational dynamics of intrinsically disordered proteins and noise contribute to phenotypic switching, especially in cancer and evolution. Prof. Kulkarni was a Visiting Professor in the Department of Mathematics, and the Department of Bioengineering at the Indian Institute of Science and is currently a Visiting Professor in the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering at Caltech. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology, UK, and inducted Member, Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society.

Tsui-Fen Chou, Ph.D., is Research Professor in the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering, and faculty Director, Proteome Exploration Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. Prof. Chou is interested in understanding the mechanisms of disease-causing mutations of p97/VCP ATPase, a key player in cell proteasome and autophagy function, and has used p97 inhibitors as tools to develop pathway-specific inhibitors. Her main research focus is on discovering underlying mechanisms that may lead to new therapeutic targets for cancer and rare diseases. Prof. Chou obtained her undergraduate degree from National Taiwan University, and her PhD from the University of Minnesota. Before she moved to Caltech, Prof. Chou was a faculty at the David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology, UK.