As director of VCU Massey Cancer Center, Robert A. Winn, M.D., oversees a cancer center designated by the National Cancer Institute that provides advanced cancer care, conducts groundbreaking research to discover new therapies for cancer, offers high-quality education and training and engages with the community to make advancements in cancer treatment and prevention equally available to all.

He is leading the nation in establishing a 21st-century model of equity for cancer science and care, in which the community is informing and partnering with Massey on its research to best address the cancer burden and disparities of those the cancer center serves, with a local focus but global impact.

Winn is committed to community-engaged research centered on eliminating health inequities. He is a principal investigator on several community-based projects funded by the NIH and National Cancer Institute, including the All of Us Research Program, a NIH precision medicine initiative. He has received national and international acclaim for his efforts to empower underserved patient populations, improve health care delivery and ensure equal access to cancer care.

Scarlett Lin Gomez, M.P.H. and Ph.D. in Epidemiology, is Professor and Vice Chair for Faculty Development in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and a member of the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, at the University of California, San Francisco, where she is Co-Leader of the Cancer Control Program and a member of the Prostate Cancer Program Leadership Committee. She is Director of the Greater Bay Area Cancer Registry, a participant in the NCI SEER (Surveillance, Epidemiology, End Results) program and the California Cancer Registry. Her research focuses primarily on cancer health disparities /inequities and aims to understand the multilevel drivers of those disparities.

Dr. Michael Sjoding is an Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine and a practicing pulmonary critical physician at the University of Michigan. He is also a faculty affiliate at the center for computational medicine and bioinformatics at the University of Michigan. Supported by grants from the NIH and Department of Defense, his research focuses on developing new computational tools to support diagnosis and identify optimal treatment strategies for patients with acute respiratory diseases. He also studies the epidemiology, healthcare delivery, and outcomes of patients with the Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome.

Dr. Purrington's research focuses on the impact of tumor biology and microenvironment on racial disparities in clinical outcomes for African Americans with cancer. Specifically, her three main areas of active research: (1) Characterizing clinically relevant molecular and immune profiles of breast and colorectal tumors in AAs, (2) understanding heritable susceptibility to breast, prostate, and colorectal cancer among AAs, particularly characterizing variants of uncertain significance in known cancer susceptibility genes, and (3) understanding the role of variability in estrogen receptor protein expression in racial disparities in ER+/HER2- breast cancer survival and treatment with endocrine therapy.

She is also interested in the combination of genetic factors and traditional epidemiologic risk factors, such as hormonal exposures and mammographic density, and how these may explain risk, biological changes in tumors, and ultimately survival. Much of her research utilizes data and biospecimens from the Detroit Research on Cancer Survivors (ROCS) cohort study, an NCI-funded prospective cohort study of African Americans recently diagnosed with breast, prostate, colorectal, and lung cancers.

Dr. Gichoya is a multidisciplinary researcher, trained as both an informatician and a clinically active radiologist. She is an assistant professor at Emory university, and works in Interventional Radiology and Informatics. She is seconded to the National Institutes of Health as a data scholar to help with the Open Data Science Platform (OSDP) component of the DSI Africa Initiative to “Harness Data Science for Health In Africa”. Her career focus is on validating machine learning models for health in real clinical settings, exploring explainability, fairness, and a specific focus on how algorithms fail. She has worked on the curation of datasets for the SIIM (Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine) hackathon and ML committee. She volunteers on the ACR and RSNA machine learning committees to support the AI ecosystem to advance development and use of AI in medicine.