SPEAKERS

Harold Varmus

Dr. Varmus received his MD from Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons.  After further medical and postdoctoral studies, he joined the faculty of UC San Francisco where, in collaboration with Michael Bishop, he performed his 1989 Nobel prize-winning studies on the cellular origins of retroviral oncogenes.  From 1993-1999 he served as Director of the National Institutes of Health, where he left a legacy of many important improvements.  Dr. Varmus currently serves as the President and CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, where he also directs a laboratory with a focus on developing mouse models for human cancer.

Harald zur Hausen

Dr. zur Hausen received his MD from the University of Düsseldorf. He has held faculty positions at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia, and the Universities of Würzburg, Erlangen-Nürnberg, and Freiburg. From 1983-2003 he was Scientific Director of the Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum (German Cancer Research Center) and professor of medicine at the University of Heidelberg. Among other important contributions, Dr. zur Hausen is widely known for his identification in the early 1980s of human papillomavirus as the causal agent of cervical cancer.  For this work he was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize, which he shares with Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, who discovered HIV.

Cliona Rooney

Prior to joining the faculty at Baylor College of Medicine in 1998, Dr. Rooney was an Associate Professor at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Dr. Rooney earned her Ph.D. in Immunology from the University of Cambridge, England. She held postdoctoral positions at the Universities of Bristol and Birmingham, and at Yale University School of Medicine. Dr. Rooney’s research focuses on the use of antigen-specific cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs) to prevent and treat virus-associated diseases and malignancies, and on methods for overcoming tumor-immune evasion strategies.

John Coffin

Dr. Coffin is American Cancer Society Research Professor of Molecular Biology at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston. Dr. Coffin’s main interest in understanding retroviruses-host interactions started as a student with Howard Temin, and later as a postdoctoral fellow with Charles Weissmann at the University of Zurich. In his subsequent and ongoing studies, Dr. Coffin has made many important contributions to the understanding of retrovirus biology, including genome structure and genetics, mechanisms of replication, mechanisms of transformation, co-evolution of viruses and hosts, and pathogenic mechanisms.

Laura Koutsky

Dr. Koutsky is a professor in epidemiology at the University of Washington School of Public Health. Dr. Koutsky’s interest in epidemiology started when she was a Peace Corps biology teacher and led to a PhD in epidemiology, which she obtained for her work with Dr. King Holmes at the University of Washington.  Among many other notable contributions, her work in collaboration with Dr. Kathrin Jansen and others made critical contributions to demonstrating the effectiveness of the world's first human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine.