Eight Mark Foundation Community Members Elected to the National Academy of Medicine

This week, the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) announced the election of 90 new regular members and 10 international members in recognition of their outstanding professional achievements and commitment to service. Election to the Academy is considered one of the highest honors in health and medicine. This year’s newly elected class includes eight remarkable members of The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research community.

We are proud to celebrate the accomplishments of these remarkable investigators:

Ross Levine, MD, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

Ross Levine is the chair of The Mark Foundation’s Scientific Advisory Committee and a member of its Board of Directors. The NAM recognized his foundational discoveries in uncovering the genetic and epigenetic mutations that cause healthy blood cells to turn into leukemia. Dr. Levine’s insights into how these mutations cooperate have played a vital role in developing new, highly targeted therapies and clinical trials for patients with aggressive myeloid malignancies.

Cory Abate-Shen, PhD, Columbia University

Cory Abate-Shen is the lead Principal Investigator at The Mark Foundation Center for Lineage Plasticity at Columbia University and an Endeavor Award recipient. The NAM recognized her pioneering work on how prostate and bladder cancers start, grow, and spread. By developing highly accurate mouse models, Dr. Abate-Shen’s lab has uncovered how cancer cells change their fundamental identities to hide from and resist therapies—discoveries that are actively shaping new diagnostic tools and treatments.

Susan Kaech, PhD, Salk Institute for Biological Studies

Susan Kaech is a co-Principal Investigator on a Mark Foundation Endeavor Award team exploring the metabolic crosstalk that governs anti-tumor immunity and other aspects of the tumor microenvironment. The NAM honored her for seminal discoveries into how memory T cells form and why immune cells become exhausted when fighting cancer. Her research explores how tumors essentially starve immune cells by hogging nutrients in the tumor microenvironment, laying the groundwork for new immunotherapies that can revitalize the immune system to attack solid tumors.

Anthony Letai, MD, PhD, National Cancer Institute

Anthony Letai is a two-time ASPIRE Award recipient whose Mark Foundation–supported research focuses on eliminating senescent cancer cells that evade traditional drugs. He is currently the director of the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health. The NAM recognized his transformative leadership in the study of programmed cell death, most notably through developing a technique called BH3 profiling, which measures exactly how close a cancer cell is to self-destructing. This functional approach lets doctors directly test and match patients with the drugs most likely to eliminate their tumors.

Alexander Marson, MD, PhD, Gladstone Institutes / University of California, San Francisco

Alexander Marson is co-Principal Investigator on a Mark Foundation Endeavor Award team utilizing advanced genetics to decode the operating system of human immune cells. The NAM honored him for pioneering the use of high-throughput CRISPR gene-editing technology in primary T cells. By identifying the exact genetic “switches” that control immune activation, Dr. Marson’s laboratory is designing the next generation of highly potent, engineered cellular immunotherapies to hunt down cancer.

Dana Pe’er, PhD, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

Dana Pe’er is an ASPIRE awardee whose laboratory operates at the intersection of single-cell genomics and computational systems biology. The NAM recognized her development of computational tools and machine-learning algorithms designed to interpret high-dimensional single-cell and spatial data. Dr. Pe’er’s methods have significantly advanced our ability to resolve cellular heterogeneity, lineage plasticity, and complex immune interactions within the tumor microenvironment.

Ali Shilatifard, PhD, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine

Ali Shilatifard is the recipient of an ASPIRE Award (delivered in partnership with the DeGregorio Family Foundation and the Torrey Coast Foundation) investigating the epigenetic regulation of gene expression. The NAM honored him for his discoveries elucidating RNA polymerase II transcriptional elongation and characterizing the COMPASS chromatin-modifying complexes. By defining how these epigenetic mechanisms are dysregulated in cancer, Dr. Shilatifard’s research provides a framework for developing targeted therapies aimed at transcriptional dependencies in aggressive tumors.

Kimberly Stegmaier, MD, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute / Boston Children’s Hospital

Kimberly Stegmaier received a Drug Discovery Award dedicated to advancing precision medicine for pediatric malignancies. The NAM recognized her work integrating chemical biology and functional genomics to identify critical vulnerabilities in pediatric tumors. Her laboratory focuses on applying targeted protein degradation and other novel approaches to overcome oncogenic drivers long considered undruggable, accelerating the translation of these discoveries into pediatric clinical trials.

“Election to the National Academy of Medicine is a profound recognition of an individual’s impact on human health,” said Mark Foundation CEO Ryan Schoenfeld, PhD. “The research conducted by these eight exceptional scientists has fundamentally altered our understanding of cancer biology and opened entirely new avenues for treatment, and we are proud to count them among our research community.”