Organizing Committee MEMBERS

Roger Olofsson Bagge is a Professor in Cancer Surgery at the University of Gothenburg and he is also a Senior consultant surgeon at Sahlgrenska University Hospital, Gothenburg, Sweden. He has a research group including both clinical and pre-clinical researchers within the Wallenberg Centre of Molecular and Translational Medicine, where the focus is translational cancer research in melanoma spanning from novel research in extracellular vesicles to randomized multicenter trials.

Michael Bernas is currently the Director of the Scholarly Pursuit and Thesis 4-year research course at the Burnett School of Medicine at TCU in Fort Worth, Texas, USA. For almost 30 years prior he was an Associate Scientific Investigator in the Department of Surgery at the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson, Arizona where he started working with Drs. Charles and Marlys Witte in the lymphology laboratories focusing on all aspects of the lymphatic system. His work encompassed research in both basic and clinical lymphology focusing on a variety of animal lymphedema models, transgenic mice, lymphatic and blood vascular growth factors, in vitro cultures, imaging techniques of the lymphatic system, and clinical treatment trials from the research aspect.

Stanley P. Leong is the Chief of the Cutaneous Oncology at the Melanoma Center of the California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC) and Senior Investigator of the CPMC Research Institute in San Francisco, California. He is also Emeritus Professor of Surgery at University of California, San Francisco. He has published several books on Cancer Metastasis with Springer and 225 peer-reviewed publications being indexed in Pubmed. He is the President of the Sentinel Node Oncology Foundation. Dr. Leong is Co-Chair of the International Congress on Cancer Metastasis taking place in San Francisco biennially since 2005.

Dr. John Mullinax is an Associate Member in the Sarcoma Department and Immunology Department of Moffitt Cancer Center and Associate Professor in the Department of Surgery at the University of South Florida Morsani College of Medicine. He is the Section Head of Surgical Oncology for the Sarcoma Department, Surgical Director of the Cellular Immunotherapy Program, and the Associate Program Director for the Complex General Surgical Oncology fellowship at Moffitt.  Dr. Mullinax is board-certified in both Surgery and Complex General Surgical Oncology by the American Board of Surgery.  Dr. Mullinax’s primary clinical focus is the surgical management of patients with soft tissue sarcoma throughout the body, to include retroperitoneal sarcoma and gastrointestinal stromal tumors.  In addition to clinical duties, Dr. Mullinax has a laboratory focused on the immune response to soft tissue sarcoma. He is working to expand adoptive cell therapy to patients with advanced sarcoma. The work from his lab serves as the basis for a trial using tumor infiltrating lymphocytes to treat adolescent and young adult patients with advanced sarcoma.  A native Floridian, he earned his MD degree with honors from the University of South Florida. He completed a General Surgery Residency in the Department of Surgery at the University of South Florida.  He completed two fellowships: first a Surgical Oncology Fellowship at the Surgery Branch, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland and another in Complex General Surgical Oncology at Moffitt Cancer Center. He represents the Moffitt Sarcoma Department in the international Transatlantic-Australasian Retroperitoneal Sarcoma Workgroup (TARPSWG).  His research has generated awards from the Society of Immunotherapy for Cancer, the Commission on Cancer of the American College of Surgeons, and Moffitt Cancer Center.   He is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons and a member of the Alpha Omega Alpha honor medical society.   Nationally, he serves as a Governor in the American College of Surgeons and is a Councilor in the Florida Chapter of the American College of Surgeons.  

I am a surgical oncologist and professor of Surgery, Wayne State Medical School at Henry Ford Health, Detroit, Michigan. I hold the chair in Breast Cancer Research at HFH

Dr. Padera is Associate Professor of Radiation Oncology at Harvard Medical School and a PI in the Edwin L. Steele Laboratories, Department of Radiation Oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Padera is also a Member of the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Faculty. He earned an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award in 2011 and was named the Rullo Family MGH Research Scholar 2021. He currently serves on the National Commission on Lymphatic Diseases. Dr. Padera is recognized as a leader in the field of functional lymphatic imaging, particularly with respect to lymphatic vessel pumping, lymphatic metastasis and lymph node imaging. He has seminal papers describing the role of functional peritumor lymphatic vessels in tumor dissemination and showing lymph node metastasis can spread to distant organs. His group has also developed a novel method to study the autonomous contraction of collecting lymphatic vessels in mice. This work opened the door to the wide array of genetic mouse models to study underlying functional lymphatic deficits in lymphedema, states of inflammation, aging and bacterial infection.

Nathan Reticker-Flynn is a tumor immunologist and Biomedical Engineer working at the interfaces of cancer metastasis, tumor evolution, adaptive immunity, and immunotherapy. He received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology while working in the lab of Dr. Sangeeta Bhatia and performed his postdoctoral studies with Dr. Edgar Engleman at Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Reticker-Flynn is currently an Assistant Professor at Stanford University in the Department of Otolaryngology and a member of the Stanford Cancer Institute. His discoveries include the revelation that effective immunotherapies require systemic activation of anti-tumor immunity and that lymph node metastases serve to reeducate adaptive immune responses in a manner that promotes distant metastasis

I am Professor and Head of the department of Radiation Oncology at the University of Arizona. I specialize in the treatment of malignant and benign brain tumors using stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS. I developed the stereotactic radiosurgery program at the University Hospital and have more than 25 years of experience in the field. I am the local PI for the NRG grant at the UACC, overseeing the opening and accrual of patients to multiple NRG group trials. I have expertise in running clinical trials. I also have considerable experience in training, mentoring and promoting an inclusive and supportive scientific environment. Over the years I have developed the skills necessary to help and support trainees in first identifying and then transition into careers in the biomedical research workforce that are consistent with their skills, interests and values.

Treasurer, Sentinel Node Oncology Foundation
Chief Academic Officer and Senior Member
Moffitt Cancer Center, Cutaneous Oncology and Sarcoma Departments
Professor of Surgery and Chair
University of South Florida, Department of Oncologic Sciences