Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C), with its scientific partner, the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), announced two new members of the SU2C Scientific Advisory Committee: John D. Carpten, PhD, Director of the Institute of Translational Genomics at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, and Roderic I. Pettigrew, PhD, MD, Chief Executive Officer of Engineering Health and Executive Dean for Engineering Medicine, at Texas A&M University.
John D. Carpten, PhD
Roderic I. Pettigrew, PhD, MD
Dr. Carpten is an expert in genome science and a pioneer in understanding the role of biology in disparate cancer incidence and mortality rates among underrepresented populations. He is Chairperson-Elect of the AACR’s Minorities in Cancer Research Council and was Program Committee Chair of AACR’s 2019 Annual Meeting in Atlanta. Dr. Carpten also serves on the SU2C committee focused on health equity in cancer clinical trials.
Dr. Pettigrew was the Founding Director of the U.S. National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering of the NIH, serving from 2002 to 2017. His newest undertaking is Engineering Health, an initiative to integrate engineering into all health care–related colleges of a university. Engineering Medicine is the first constituent initiative, in a joint partnership between Texas A&M and Houston Methodist Hospital, to create a new training program that integrates engineering into medical training to develop a new type of engineering-minded physician who invents solutions to health-care problems. All graduates simultaneously earn both an MD and a master’s degree in engineering and are required to invent something to address a health-care challenge during their 4 years of study. ■
