Ticiana A. Leal, MD, is faculty in the Division of Hematology, Medical Oncology and Palliative Care at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. Dr. Leal earned her medical degree from the Federal University of Ceara, Brazil, and completed her residency at University of Chicago Hospitals. She completed her fellowship at University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics and the University of Illinois. Dr. Leal is board certified in medical oncology and palliative care medicine. She is a medical oncologist specializing in thoracic malignancies. She is a member of the NCCN NSCLC and mesothelioma/thymic malignancies panels. Her academic appointments include Thoracic Oncology Program Director, and Co-Chair of the Big Ten CRC Thoracic Clinical Trial Working Group. She is a member of the ECOG/ACRIN Thoracic Committee, NRG Oncology Medical Oncology Committee, and member of the IASLC LATAM Latin American Working Group, among many others. She has authored or coauthored numerous peer-reviewed original research articles, book chapters, and posters.

Roy S. Herbst, MD, PhD is Ensign Professor of Medicine, Professor of Pharmacology, Chief of Medical Oncology, and Associate Director for Translational Research at Yale Cancer Center (YCC) and Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT.

Dr. Herbst has worked over several decades as a pioneer of personalized medicine and immunotherapy to identify biomarkers and bring novel targeted treatments and immunotherapies to patients, serving as principal investigator for numerous clinical trials testing these agents in advanced stage lung cancers. This work led to the approval of several therapies (such as gefitinib, cetuximab, bevacizumab, axitinib, atezolizumab, and pembrolizumab), which have revolutionized the field and greatly enhanced patient survival. His leadership in targeted therapeutics resulted in a 2020 ASCO plenary talk and publication of results of the third-generation EGFR-inhibitor osimertinib for the treatment of resected EGFR-mutant NSCLC in the New England Journal of Medicine. He and his Yale colleagues were among the first to describe the PD-1/PD-L1 adaptive immune response in early phase trials and to offer trials of PD-L1 inhibitors atezolizumab and pembrolizumab to lung cancer patients. In 2015 and again in 2020, his team at Yale was awarded a Lung Cancer SPORE (P50 grant) by the NCI, which has identified new immunotherapies and mechanisms of sensitivity and resistance to EGFR targeted therapies.

His work on "umbrella” trials has galvanized the field of targeted therapy and cancer drug approvals at the FDA. Nationally, he works closely with public-private partnerships to develop large master protocol clinical studies, such as Lung-MAP. He testified on the subject of modernizing clinical trials during the 21st Century Cures hearing before the US House of Representatives Subcommittee on Health and has served as a prominent figure in the public policy arena, for nine years having served as a member of the National Academy of Medicine’s Cancer Policy Forum, for which he organized several meetings focused on policy issues in personalized medicine and tobacco control.

Dr. Herbst is a highly respected clinician­ scientist who has been a champion of translational medicine for decades, recently authoring a high-profile review of the 20-year progress in lung cancer. He has authored or co-authored more than 350 publications, including peer-reviewed journal articles, abstracts, and book chapters. His work has appeared in many prominent journals, such as the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Clinical Cancer Research, Lancet, and the New England Journal of Medicine. Work published in Nature was awarded the 2015 Herbert Pardes Clinical Research Excellence Award by the Clinical Research Forum.

He is a Fellow of the American Society of Clinical Oncology and a member of the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR), where he serves as an elected member of its board of directors and chairs the Tobacco Task Force. He has been a major proponent of efforts to promote tobacco control and regulation (including e-cigarettes), authoring multiple policy statements and leading frequent Capitol Hill briefings. In 2019 he was elected to the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) board of directors. He is a fellow of the American College of Physicians and an elected member of the Association of American Physicians. He is vice chair of the Southwestern Oncology Group’s (SWOG) Lung Committee.

For his lifetime achievement in scientific contributions to thoracic cancer research, Dr. Herbst was awarded the 2016 Paul A. Bunn, Jr. Scientific Award by the IASLC at their 17th World Conference on Lung Cancer in Vienna, Austria. A team of Yale Cancer Center investigators led by Roy S. Herbst, MD, PhD, was awarded the 2018 Team Science Award from the Association for Clinical and Translational Science (ACTS) for its pioneering work in advancing our understanding of Immunotherapy. In 2020, Dr. Herbst was awarded the AACR Distinguished Public Service Award for Exceptional Leadership in Cancer Science Policy.