Four OHSU faculty members have been appointed to work on the Cancer Moonshot initiative led by Vice President Joe Biden, which aims to accelerate progress in prevention, diagnosis, and treatment.

The OHSU scientists will join other experts organized in seven working groups to make recommendations for major opportunities that could lead to significant breakthroughs in cancer research. From left to right in the photograph above, the faculty members are:

Sadik Esener, Ph.D., Wendt family endowed chair in early cancer detection and director of the Knight Cancer Institute Center for Early Detection Research • Moonshot working group: Precision prevention and early detection

Joe Gray, Ph.D., Gordon Moore endowed chair in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, associate director for biophysical oncology in the Knight Cancer Institute, and director of the Center for Spatial Systems Biomedicine • Moonshot working group: Tumor evolution and progression

Melissa Haendel, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology and director of the Ontology Development Group in the OHSU Library • Moonshot working group: Enhanced data sharing

Shannon McWeeney, Ph.D., professor and head of the Division of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology in the Department of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology, director of the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute Biodev Lab, and director of OCTRI Translational Bioinformatics • Moonshot working group: Enhanced data sharing