The members of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) have elected Nationwide Children's Hospital's Elaine R. Mardis, PhD, as their President-Elect for 2018-2019. She will officially become President-Elect at the AACR Annual Meeting 2018, to be held in Chicago, April 14-18, and will assume the presidency in April 2019 at the AACR Annual Meeting 2019.
Mardis holds the Nationwide Foundation Endowed Chair in Genomic Medicine and is co-executive director of the Institute for Genomic Medicine at Nationwide Children's Hospital, and professor of pediatrics at The Ohio State University College of Medicine. She is a world-renowned researcher whose work centers on the genomic characterization of cancer and its implications for cancer medicine.
As AACR President-Elect, Mardis will work with the Board of Directors and the AACR membership, which includes more than 40,000 members in 120 countries, to further the association’s mission to prevent and cure all cancers through research, education, communication, and collaboration.
“I am humbled and excited by the AACR election result and I look forward to the opportunity to serve as the President of an organization whose vision and goals I have championed for many years," Mardis said.
“Elaine Mardis has been an incredibly dynamic leader in the quest to improve our understanding of cancer by analyzing the human genome,” said Margaret Foti, PhD, MD (hc), chief executive officer of the AACR. “Her pioneering work in DNA sequencing has led to dramatic advances in our knowledge of how genetic mutations can cause cancer to develop and progress. This, in turn, has brought us closer to the goal of personalized medicine, which has helped reduce mortality from the scourge of cancer.”
Mardis received a bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude, and her PhD from the University of Oklahoma. She spent much of her early career at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, as a professor, researcher, and ultimately, co-director of The McDonnell Genome Institute.
Mardis, an AACR member since 2009, is currently serving as Program Committee Chair for the AACR Annual Meeting 2018, and is a member of the AACR Board of Directors. Among her other AACR affiliations, she has served as a committee member for the Pezcoller Foundation-AACR Award, an AACR Project GENIE Advisory Board member; and an AACR Special Conferences committee member. She was a member of the Steering Committee for the 2013-2014 AACR Cancer Progress Report, and a member of the Annual Meeting Program Committee from 2011-2013. She was the co-chair of the AACR Precision Medicine Series: Integrating Clinical Genomics and Cancer Therapy conference in Salt Lake City, and has served on the organizing committees of several other conferences. She is a senior editor of the AACR journal Molecular Cancer Research.
Mardis has presented keynote addresses and other invited remarks at international conferences on topics including cancer genomics, next-generation sequencing technology, personalized medicine, and cancer immunogenomics. She has received numerous awards, including Distinguished Alumna of the College of Arts and Sciences, University of Oklahoma; the George Engelmann Interdisciplinary Award, St. Louis Academy of Science; the American Association for Clinical Chemistry Morton K. Schwartz Award for Significant Contributions in Cancer Research Diagnostics; and the Precision Medicine World Congress 2017 Luminary Award.
The members of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) have elected Nationwide Children's Hospital's Elaine R. Mardis, PhD, as their President-Elect for 2018-2019.