Abhishek Shankar, MD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Radiation Oncology at All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Patna, India. He has worked at All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi from 2012-2019 in different capacities i.e. Resident, Research Fellow, and Faculty. He is a NCI Cancer Prevention Fellow and recipient of many National and International awards. He is a Member and Chair of many National and International Committees. His areas of clinical and research interests include community based cancer prevention, quality of life issues in cancer patients, cancer screening, global oncology, cancer policy, cancer management in resource-limited settings, tobacco control and smoking cessation, and familial and high risk cancers.

Dr. Sonam Puri MD. is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Oncology, Department of Medicine at the University of Utah. She is a specialist in medical oncology with a focus on the treatment of thoracic malignancies. She is originally from New Delhi, India, and earned her medical degree from Pandit B.D Sharma PGIMS Rohtak, Haryana. She then completed her Internal Medicine Residency at the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington, Connecticut, and a fellowship in Hematology and Oncology at H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute/the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida.

Dr Puri’s research interests include clinical research in thoracic malignancies, with emphasis on immunotherapy, targeted therapy and other novel treatment strategies for non-small and small cell lung cancer. She is an active member of the Lung Cancer Disease Center of Excellence at the Huntsman cancer institute. She is also a member of several national and international professional organizations like the American Society of Medical Oncology, Southwest Oncology Group, Society of Immunotherapy of Cancer, and International Association of Study of Lung Cancer where she serves as a member of the membership committee.

Dr. Chun is a Board Certified Radiation Oncologist practicing at the MD Anderson Cancer Center. Dr. Chun has published high profile clinical research on lung cancer in major medical journals and serves as Principal Investigator of multiple prospective clinical trials at MD Anderson. Dr. Chun also serves as a member of NRG Oncology Lung Cancer Core Committee, the American Board of Radiology Lung/Sarcoma Radiation Oncology Board Examination Committee and the American Radium Society Thoracic Appropriate Use Criteria Committee.

Professor Isabelle Opitz is Director of the Department of Thoracic Surgery and Chair of the Lung Cancer Center, University Hospital Zurich, Switzerland. Beside her general thoracic surgery activity, other interests are the treatment of pleural mesothelioma, pulmonary endarterectomy and transplantation. She was awarded with several national and international prizes and has acquired more than 6 million Euro grant for her own research. She is an author of more than 100 original articles, multiple reviews, and book chapters. She is a member of numerous societies and currently treasurer and president elect of the European Society of Thoracic Surgery where she has a leading function in the Learning Affairs Committee. For IASLC she is a representative of the task force MPM and a member of the MPM and N-descriptor staging sub-committee.

Lauren Averett Byers, MD, MS is an Associate Professor in the Department of Thoracic and Head and Neck Medical Oncology and an Andrew Sabin Family Fellow at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. She completed her B.A. degree in Molecular Biology at Princeton University, her M.D. at Baylor College of Medicine, and M.S. in Patient-Based Research at the University of Texas Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. She is a member of the National Cancer Institute’s Small Cell Lung Cancer (SCLC) Consortium and serves on the NCI’s Thoracic Malignancy Steering Committee and SCLC Working Group.

Dr. Byers’ laboratory is focused on the molecular profiling of small cell lung cancer and the development of new treatments and predictive biomarkers, particularly as they pertain to drugs targeting DNA damage repair (DDR) and immunotherapy. As a direct extension of work completed in her lab, she has led multiple clinical trials for patients with lung cancer. In addition to an outstanding publication record of over 100 peer reviewed manuscripts, Dr. Byers has earned multiple honors including two AACR The Best of AACR Journals Awards, the MD Anderson President’s Recognition for Faculty Excellence - Research Excellence Award, and most recently, membership of The American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI).

As a physician-scientist, her landmark research led to the identification of fundamental differences in the molecular wiring of SCLC, including the identification of PARP1 and other DNA damage repair (DDR) proteins as novel therapeutic targets for SCLC. Building on this, her group also identified a new role of DDR inhibitors in activating the innate immune system, whereby dramatically enhancing response to immune checkpoint blockade in preclinical models. Recently, her team has defined molecularly distinct subtypes of SCLC that predict response to targeted therapy and immunotherapy and uncovered tumor heterogeneity as a driver of resistance using innovative, patient-derived models (published in Cancer Cell 2021 and Nature Cancer 2020).

Expertise: My main research interests are the multidisciplinary synthetic therapy on lung cancer from basic science to bedside and evidence-based medicine in oncology.
Achievement: I lead some scientific research projects including National Key Research and Development Program of China and National Natural Science Foundation of China. I participate more than 120 multicenter clinical trials in lung cancer field and acts as Principle Investigator (PI) of 28 clinical trials.
Published Articles: I published more than 70 SCI research papers in the past five years and one of them was published in Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO) (IF=32.956).
Awards: Obtained second prize of National Scientific and Technological Progress Award, first prize of China Medical Science and technology award, first prize and second prize of Guangdong science and technology award.

Studied medicine at the University in Bergen, Norway. Trained to become a specialist in Oncology at St. Olav's Hospital, the University Hospital in Trondheim, Norway. Completed my Ph.D. at NTNU, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, also in Trondheim. Professor in Oncology at the Department of Clinical and Molecular Medicine, NTNU, and Consultant in Oncology (both medical oncology and radiation therapy) at St. Olav's Hospital. Member of the board of the Norwegian Lung Cancer Study Group. Research activity include clinical trials and translational research on lung cancer, health related quality of life, and cancer in elderly. Most current research focuses on small-cell lung cancer.

Carl Gay received his undergraduate degree in Biology from Johns Hopkins University. He then received both his MD and PhD, the latter in Cellular & Molecular Biology, from the New York University School of Medicine. Dr. Gay subsequently completed his clinical training in internal medicine University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and medical oncology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, where he now serves as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Thoracic/Head & Neck Medical Oncology with a focus on translational research and clinical trial development for patients with small cell lung cancer

Terufumi Kato, MD, is a chief physician at Thoracic Oncology Department in Kanagawa Cancer Center in Yokohama, Japan. Dr Kato received his medical degree from the Faculty of Medicine at Kyoto University in Japan. He served his residency in general practice and internal medicine at Tenri Hospital in Nara, Japan, after which he joined the staff physician in department of respiratory medicine of the hospital. He completed an advanced clinical fellowship in medical oncology at the National Cancer Center Hospital in Tokyo and completed a research fellowship at the National Cancer Center Research Institute, also in Tokyo. He is now a member of international society including ASCO, ESMO, IASLC, and also taking part in several committee member or faculty of Japanese society of medical oncology, Japanese lung cancer society and Japanese respiratory society. One of his main research fields is clinical research for medical treatment for lung cancer especially concerning genomic diagnosis, drug therapy for driver oncogenic cancers, and immunotherapy. Other field is management of drug induced pneumonitis in both lung cancer and other tumor treatment.