Conference Speakers

Leah Backhus MD MPH FACS trained at the University of Southern California and the University of California Los Angeles. She is Associate Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Stanford University and has grant funding through the Veterans Affairs Administration and the NIH. Her research examines imaging surveillance following treatment for lung cancer. She holds several leadership roles within the STS, AATS, and WTS also serves as Chair of the Women and Lung Cancer Task Group of the National Lung Cancer Roundtable of the American Cancer Society and Chair of the ACGME Thoracic Residency Review Committee.

Dr. Bruna Pellini is an Assistant Member at the Department of Thoracic Oncology at Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute and an Assistant Professor at Morsani College of Medicine at University of South Florida. She received her medical degree from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil and completed her residency at University of Central Florida College of Medicine, where she was awarded the “Clinical Skills Award” in 2015, and was inducted into the prestigious Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society in 2016. Dr. Pellini completed her medical oncology fellowship at Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, where she worked at the laboratory of Aadel Chaudhuri, MD, PhD conducting research on circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) for minimal residual disease (MRD) detection across different solid tumors. Dr. Pellini is an active member of the Lung Cancer Center of Excellence and the and Molecular Medicine Committees at Moffitt Cancer Center. She specializes in the care of patients diagnosed with lung cancer. Her research interest lies in the study of liquid biopsies as a biomarker to monitor treatment response and MRD, in the development of clinical trials incorporating ctDNA MRD to personalize treatment algorithms and trials with novel therapeutics targeting genomic alterations in non-small cell lung cancer.