Lubin Scholars and Lubin Mentors
Lubin Family Foundation Scholars include some of the nation's most promising early-career investigators. Each Scholar is pursuing cancer-relevant basic or translational laboratory-based research, and each has demonstrated the potential to join the next generation of leaders in cancer research. Their mentors are leaders in their respective scientific fields — providing the scholars with guidance, support, and inspiration.
Scholars and Mentors
2023 Lubin Scholars and Lubin Mentors
- Scholar Elliott Brea, MD, PhD; Mentors Eric Smith, MD, PhD, and David Barbie, MD
- Scholar William Gibson, MD, PhD; Mentor Matthew Meyerson, MD, PhD
- Scholar Alexandria Maurer, MD, PhD; Mentor Catherine Wu, MD
Read about our 2023 Scholars and Mentors below.
Scholar Elliott Brea, MD, PhD, and Mentors Eric Smith, MD, PhD, and David Barbie, MD
Elliott Brea MD, PhD, is focused on developing new cellular therapies for lung cancer. Brea completed his MD and PhD degrees at Weill Cornell Medicine, and went on to complete his Internal Medicine residency at Brigham and Women's Hospital. He is currently a fellow in the Dana-Farber/Mass General Brigham Hematology/Oncology program. With his mentors, Brea is working on developing and translating chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy in difficult-to-treat lung cancers. By focusing on identifying new targets as well as manipulating the tumor microenvironment, they are confident that they can translate their findings into the clinic.
Eric Smith, MD, PhD, is Director of Translational Research for Immune Effector Cell Therapies at Dana-Farber; Principal Investigator of a pre-clinical laboratory; and Assistant Professor, Harvard Medical School. He received his MD/PhD and internal medicine training at Mount Sinai School of Medicine/Hospital, and medical oncology and post-doctoral training at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where he stayed on as faculty in the Cellular Engineering Center and Myeloma/Cellular Therapy services before being recruited to Dana-Farber in 2020.
The Smith Lab for Gene and Cell Engineering focuses on advancing the field of gene, cellular, and mRNA immunotherapies for both hematologic and solid tumors, and translation of such therapies for the benefit of patients. An example of recent prior work includes the identification of GPRC5D as a target for the immunotherapy of myeloma, and generation and translation of the first GPRC5D-targeted CAR to the clinic (STM 2019; NEJM 2022).
David Barbie, MD, is a thoracic medical oncologist in the Lowe Center for Thoracic Oncology, Dana-Farber; Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School; and Associate Director, Belfer Center for Applied Cancer Science. Barbie was Principal Investigator of a multicenter lung cancer clinical trial using this first-generation drug, and his work also led to similar studies in colorectal and pancreatic cancer. Currently, his laboratory is developing ways to co-opt TBK1 signaling to drive an antiviral response that can boost the impact of cancer immunotherapies. As a fellow, he was the recipient of an ASCO Young Investigator award and NIH K08 grant. Since starting his laboratory, he has also received an ASCI Young Physician Scientist Award, and was elected as an ASCI Member in 2019.
Scholar William Gibson, MD, PhD, and Mentor Matthew Meyerson, MD, PhD
William Gibson, MD, PhD, earned degrees in Biological Engineering and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He then joined the Harvard-MIT MD/PhD program, where he worked with Rameen Beroukhim on understanding cancer evolution and the therapeutic vulnerabilities of somatic copy number alterations. Gibson completed his residency in internal medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital and is completing his Medical Oncology fellowship at Dana Farber. He performs research in the laboratories of Matthew Meyerson, MD, PhD, and Stuart Schreiber, PhD, where he is using emerging insights from chemical biology to address drug cancer's most intractable drivers, tumor suppressor genes.
Matthew Meyerson, MD, PhD, serves as Charles A. Dana Chair in Human Cancer Genetics at Dana-Farber; Professor of Genetics and Medicine at Harvard Medical School; and an Institute Member of the Cancer Program at the Broad Institute. Meyerson and colleagues have discovered genes and gene alterations important in human cancer, including the cyclin-dependent kinase genes CDK2 and CDK6, the telomerase catalytic subunit gene TERT, somatic mutations in lung cancer in EGFR (with Bill Sellers, MD, Bruce Johnson, MD, and Pasi Jänne, MD, PhD), BRAF, U2AF1, RBM10, HLA genes and others, and copy number alterations including lineage amplifications of NKX2-1 and SOX2 in lung cancers.
The current focus of the Meyerson Laboratory includes somatic alterations in the non-coding cancer genome, the cancer microbiome, and genome-inspired cancer drug discovery. Meyerson has been privileged to mentor a generation of young cancer scientists, among them many wonderful Dana-Farber oncology fellows.
Scholar Alexandria Maurer, MD, PhD, and Mentor Catherine Wu, MD
Alexandria Maurer, MD, PhD, grew up in Oklahoma, then attended the University of Rochester, where she did research in T-cell immunodeficiencies. She completed her MD/PhD training at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine in New York, NY, where she studied host defense mechanisms and infection. Maurer completed an Internal Medicine residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, followed by medical oncology training at the Dana-Farber/Mass General Brigham fellowship program, and she is currently an Instructor in Stem Cell Transplantation in Dana-Farber's Department of Medical Oncology. Her current research centers on understanding how immune cells from a stem cell transplant donor can eradicate blood cancer cells in patients with leukemia.
Catherine Wu, MD, is a Professor of Medicine and Chief, Division of Stem Cell Transplantation and Cellular Therapies, at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the Association of American Physicians. Wu received her MD from Stanford University School of Medicine, and completed her clinical training in Internal Medicine and Hematology-Oncology at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Dana-Farber. She joined the staff at Dana-Farber in 2000. At Dana-Farber, she has initiated an integrated program of research and clinical activities that focuses on dissecting the basis of effective anti-tumor immunity. Wu's laboratory has focused on the use of genomics-based approaches to discover immunogenic antigen targets, and to understand the molecular basis of therapeutic response and resistance. She has led early-phase clinical trials to test personalized tumor vaccines in melanoma and glioblastoma.