Georgetown Lombardi Visiting Professor and Grand Rounds Lecture Series Featuring Kornelia Polyak, MD

“Breast Tumor Evolution”

Presented by:
Kornelia Polyak, MD
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School
Sponsor: Dr. Joyce Slingerland and Dr. Marc Lippman

Kornelia Polyak, MD, PhD, is a professor of medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, and is an internationally recognized leader of the breast cancer research field.

Dr. Polyak’s laboratory is dedicated to the molecular analysis of human breast cancer, with the goal of improving the clinical management of breast cancer patients. Her lab has worked to develop new ways to study tumors as a whole and to apply interdisciplinary approaches. Using these methods, Dr. Polyak’s lab has been at the forefront of studies analyzing purified cell populations from normal and neoplastic human breast tissue at genomic scale and in situ at the single-cell level, and to apply mathematical and ecological models to better understand breast tumor evolution. She has also been successful with the clinical translation of her findings, including the testing of the efficacy of JAK2 and BET bromodomain inhibitors for the treatment of triple-negative breast cancer in clinical trials.

Dr. Polyak has received numerous awards, including the Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research in 2011, the 2012 AACR Outstanding Investigator Award for Breast Cancer Research, and the Rosalind Franklin Award in 2016. She was elected a Fellow of the AAAS in 2019 and to the AACR Academy of Fellows in 2020. She is also a 2015 recipient of the NCI Outstanding Investigator award and is a recipient of the 2020 Distinguished Alumna Award from Weil-Cornell.

Lecture Series Presented by Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center