Dr. Owonikoko is a Professor and Vice Chair for Faculty Development in the Department of Hematology and Medical Oncology at Emory University. He is also a Georgia Research Alliance Distinguished Cancer Scientist. He received his medical degree from the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife Nigeria in 1991 and a doctoral degree in Anatomic Pathology from the Heinrich Heine University, Dusseldorf, Germany in 2000. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA from 2000 to 2002. He completed Internal Medicine residency training at the Graduate Hospital, Drexel University in Philadelphia in 2005 followed by a clinical fellowship in Hematology/Medical Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh in 2008. He has been on faculty at Emory University since 2008 and has focused his translational research activities on lung cancer, thyroid cancer and early phase drug development. Dr. Owonikoko has received peer-reviewed grant funding from the NIH, DOD and Georgia Cancer Coalition. He has published over 230 peer-reviewed manuscripts in high impact journals including New England Journal of Medicine, Cell, Science, Nature, CA Cancer Journal, Cancer Cell, Lancet Oncology, JCO, Cancer Discovery, Nature Communications, Oncogene, Cancer Research, Clinical Cancer Research and Journal of Thoracic Oncology.

Dr. Juergens received her medical degree from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. She was an intern and resident in the Osler Internal Medicine Training Program at The Johns Hopkins Medical Institute. She completed a fellowship in medical oncology with a focus on upper aerodigestive malignancies as well at Johns Hopkins. Additionally, she completed her Ph.D. in Clinical Investigation at The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She was on the faculty at Johns Hopkins from 2007-2010 until she joined the faculty at McMaster University.
Dr. Juergens’ clinical expertise is in lung and esophageal cancer. She chairs the Lung Disease Site Team at the Juravinski Cancer Centre in Hamilton, Ontario. She is the Head of the Department of Clinical Trials at the Juravinski Cancer Centre. She is a member of the Escarpment Cancer Research Institute.
Her research focus has been in developmental therapeutics with a concentration on Phase I and II clinical trials. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the Canadian Cancer Trials Group Investigational New Drug Committee. She has published her work in prominent journals including such as the Journal of Clinical Oncology and Cancer Discovery. She has been a principal investigator on numerous clinical trials assessing immune based therapy in lung cancer as well as esophagogastric cancer. She has been using PD-1 inhibitors since their initial phase I trials. She is a highly sought teacher in the field of immunotherapy and has been an invited speaker across the world.

Dr. William (Bill) K Evans is a medical oncologist with a career long interest in lung cancer as a clinician, clinical trialist and hospital/cancer centre administrator. He has been involved in modelling the cost and cost-effectiveness of lung cancer screening and treatment interventions in collaboration with Statistics Canada and the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer. He is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Oncology, McMaster University, Ontario Health (Cancer Care Ontario)’s Clinical Advisor on Smoking Cessation and a member of IASLC’s Tobacco Control and Smoking Cessation Committee. Dr. Evans has published over 300 publications in peer-reviewed journals on various aspects of lung cancer treatment, smoking cessation and the cost and cost-effectiveness of cancer care.

Jacek Jassem, MD, PhD, is a Professor of Clinical Oncology and Radiotherapy and Head of the Department of Oncology and Radiotherapy at the Medical University of Gdansk, Poland. He received his MD and PhD from the Medical University of Gdańsk and undertook training at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden and the National Cancer Institute in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
He is a past chairman of the European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) Breast Cancer Group and the EORTC Executive Committee, the chairman of the Central and East European Oncology Group, past chairman of the American Society of Clinical Oncology International Affairs Committee and a past president of the Polish Oncological Society. He is a member of the Academia Europea, European Academy of Cancer Sciences, and the Polish Academy of Art and Sciences. He served in the executive boards of the European Society for Radiation Oncology and the European Society for Medical Oncology.
He has authored or co-authored over 800 full articles, books and book chapters in these fields, as well as 11 patents or patent applications. He is the recipient of a number of Polish and International scientific awards including Polish Prime Minister’s scientific award, President of Vienna Foundation Award for Innovative Cancer Research, Joseph W. Cullen Prevention/Early Detection Award of the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer.
Prof. Jassem has been involved with nationwide public health initiatives, such as authoring the Polish anti-tobacco legislation to limit smoking in public places (introduced by Parliament in 2010), the development of IASLC Declaration (2019) and the coordination of Cancer Control Strategy for Poland 2015–2024.

DR. GRAHAM WARREN, MD, PhD, is a Board-Certified Radiation Oncologist, Vice Chairman for Research in the Department of Radiation Oncology, and Mary Gilbreth Endowed Chair of Clinical Oncology in Hollings Cancer Center at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC). His primary clinical emphasis is in the treatment of gastrointestinal and thoracic malignancies and has served as the Medical Director for Tobacco at MUSC and Roswell Park Cancer Institute. He works with several local, regional, national, and international organizations to increase access to evidence-based tobacco cessation support for cancer patients. He is an Expert Advisor for the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer (CPAC) and works with the National Institutes of Health to implement strategies to address tobacco use across cancer care and has served as a chair and/or member on tobacco or prevention committees for the American Society for Clinical Oncology (ASCO), American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC), Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco (SRNT), National Lung Cancer Roundtable, National Cancer Institute (NCI), and the Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology Cooperative Group. He was a contributor for the 2014 Surgeon General’s Report on Tobacco providing the foundational work demonstrating that smoking by cancer patients and survivors causes adverse cancer treatment outcomes. He was a contributor for the 2020 Surgeon General’s Report demonstrating that smoking cessation after a cancer diagnosis improves survival in cancer patients. His work has been used to develop tobacco treatment programs for cancer patients at the institutional, regional, statewide, national, and international level including cessation initiatives across Canadian Provinces and Territories and for the NCI Cancer Center Cessation Initiative (C3I) P30 supplement distributed across NCI Designated Cancer Centers. His primary research interest is in evaluating the biologic, clinical, behavioral, and economic effects of tobacco on cancer treatment outcomes including identifying critical biologic targets to improve therapeutic outcomes in cancer patients exposed to tobacco, and optimizing behavioral and clinical methods to optimize data collection that can be used for clinical decision making and research.

Byoung Chul Cho is a translational medical oncologist at Yonsei Cancer Center and a professor of medicine and joint faculty professor of Severance Biomedical Science Institute at Yonsei University College of Medicine. He is currently a chief of the Lung Cancer Center at Yonsei Cancer Center. He also serves as a director of the Yuhan-Yonsei Lung Cancer Clinical and Translational Medicine Center. Since 2021, he was appointed as a director of Yonsei New Il Han Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.
Professor Cho has won numerous awards in recognition of his excellence in research and medical education. For the past 13 years, he has been invited as a speaker for many international conferences on lung cancer. Currently, he sits on 25 steering committees and advisory boards both regionally and internationally.
Professor Cho’s scientific interests appertain to development of novel therapeutic options for the treatment of resistance to targeted therapy and immunotherapy. He has been a principal investigator in more than 100 global clinical trials with novel targeted agents and immunotherapies in lung cancer and has led many nationwide multicenter trials in thoracic malignancies.
An accomplished researcher with over 200 publications in renowned journals such as Lancet Oncology, Journal of Clinical Oncology and New England Journal of Medicine, Professor Cho is also actively involved as a reviewer of a number of medical journals. Since 2013, he was appointed as an Associate Editor of Lung Cancer.

David Planchard, MD, PhD, is a Thoracic Oncologist, and Head of the Thoracic Cancer Group in the Department of Medicine at Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France.
With a career in lung cancer research spanning almost 30 years, his current research interests focus primarily on immunotherapy, genomic analysis (and high-throughput technologies) to drive lung cancer patients into specific targeted agents, and biomarkers for targeted treatment of bronchial cancers. Alongside this, he regularly co-directs clinical trials investigating thoracic tumors to develop a long-term clinical research strategy based on molecular screening with a particular focus on BRAF NSCLC.
David Planchard has been involved in over 100 Phase I-III trials and has published more than 150 articles in internationally renowned, peer-reviewed journals. He also coordinated the drafting of the latest European recommendations on the management of advanced non-small-cell lung cancer (ESMO guidelines) and is a member of the French-language Respiratory Society (SPLF), the French Intergroup of Thoracic Oncology (IFCT), ESMO, American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and American Association for Cancer Research (AACR).