Maura L. Gillison, MD, PhD
Maura Gillison did not chase awards. She chased answers, and especially clinically impactful answers. That distinction between the pursuit of recognition and the pursuit of truth defined everything about her as a scientist, a clinician, and a person. She was direct with compassion, generous to the last, and possessed of a laugh that could fill a room. To the surprise of many who only knew her as a speaker behind a podium, she was also a trained dancer who had not entirely left the dance floor.
Dr. Gillison passed away on June 21, 2026, surrounded by her devoted mother, her husband, Dr. David Symer, and her daughters, Sanna and Lia. She died as she had lived: on her own terms, in her childhood home in Ohio. The field she transformed is immeasurably poorer for her loss.
A Discovery That Changed Everything
Born in Ontario, Canada, and raised across the United States and Mexico, Maura brought a global sensibility to everything she touched. She studied zoology at Duke University before earning her medical degree from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and later her doctoral degree in clinical investigation at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, a dual mastery that would prove uniquely well-suited to the question that would consume her career: Why were some people with head and neck cancer doing so unexpectedly well?
The answer, as she demonstrated in a landmark paper that she published with colleagues in 2000 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, was HPV.1 Specifically, HPV-16, a sexually transmitted virus, is a direct causal agent in a distinct and biologically different subset of head and neck cancers. This finding overturned nearly a century of conventional wisdom attributing all head and neck cancers to tobacco and alcohol. She is widely recognized as the first to establish this causal link conclusively.
Her own reflection on the work was characteristic, as she told The ASCO Post in 2019: “Although the 2000 JNCI paper changed my whole career, I was having so much fun that I didn’t realize its implications.” Fun, she always insisted, was not a distraction from good science; it was the engine of it.
Building the Evidence, Brick by Brick
What followed was 25 years of systematic, relentless science. Seminal papers in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2007 and 2010 characterized the epidemiology of HPV-associated head and neck cancer, identified sexual transmission as a key risk factor, and established the striking difference in prognosis between HPV-positive and HPV-negative disease.2,3 In 2009, she presented data at the ASCO Annual Meeting demonstrating that HPV status is the single most important predictor of clinical outcome in oropharyngeal cancer, work that prompted the National Cancer Institute to mandate HPV stratification in all HNSCC clinical trials. It was, in the most literal sense, a redrawing of the map. It was a game changer for our field.
From the Jeg Coughlin Chair at Ohio State to the halls of MD Anderson, she used every platform to push further: into the molecular mechanisms of HPV-driven malignancy, into treatment de-escalation strategies that might spare patients unnecessary toxicity, and into the global implications of HPV vaccination for cancer prevention. Her science was never abstract. It was always ultimately about the patient and always to address fundamental questions.
Honors Earned, Never Sought
The accolades accumulated despite her indifference to them: election to the American Society for Clinical Investigation (2010); the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Memorial Award from AACR (2012); election to the National Academy of Medicine (2013); the Karnofsky Award and Lecture from ASCO (2021). In 2025, she received the VinFuture Grand Prize, an international distinction recognizing discoveries that create tangible, scalable, and positive change that benefits humanity. She accepted these recognitions graciously and went immediately back to work.
The Whole Person
Those who knew Maura well knew that the scientist was inseparable from the person. She had trained as a dancer in her youth and carried that physicality with her, a precision, a sense of rhythm, an understanding that timing matters. She was intentional in every decision and action, ensuring they were consistent with her moral compass. She was not one to mince words; she told you what she thought, plainly and without performance, and you trusted her the more for it. She possessed a humor that was quick and pointed and occasionally, memorably, irreverent. She was devoted to her family with the same intensity she brought to her work.
She mentored generously and without ego, the kind of mentor who asked harder questions of the people she believed in, and whose belief meant something precisely because it was not freely given. Researchers, clinicians, and public health advocates across six continents carry her influence forward in the questions they ask and the rigor with which they pursue answers.
Every Day Is a Beautiful Day—Don’t Let It Get Away
Maura Gillison understood, perhaps more acutely than most, that time is not infinite and that what you do with it is everything. She would have little patience for grief that became paralysis. Her life’s message, spoken in data and in deed, was that discovery is an act of hope and hope requires showing up.
In the spirit she would recognize and probably smile at, in that way she had. To humbly borrow a thought from the song she might have danced to: It’s a beautiful day. Don’t let it get away. For those of us who had the privilege of working alongside her, or learning from her, or simply witnessing what relentless curiosity in service of humanity looks like, the obligation is clear. Carry the work forward. Ask the harder question. Make the day beautiful, make it count.
Her discovery that HPV causes a substantial subset of head and neck cancers will continue to save lives—through expanded vaccination, refined staging, and treatments designed around biology rather than assumption—long after those who knew her are gone. That is the measure of a life in science. That is Maura Gillison’s measure.
Sue S. Yom, MD, PhD, MAS, FASTRO, is Professor and Vice Chair, Strategic Advisory Department of Radiation Oncology; Professor, Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, at the University of California, San Francisco; David Raben, MD, is Senior Executive Advisor with Bicara Therapeutics;A. Dimitrios Colevas, MD, FASCO, is Professor of Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine; and CaroleFakhry, MD, MPH, is Professor of Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery at Johns Hopkins University.
REFERENCES
1. Gillison ML, Koch WM, Capone RB, et al. Evidence for a causal association between human papillomavirus and a subset of head and neck cancers. J Natl Cancer Inst 92:709-720, 2000.
2. D’Souza G, Kreimer AR, Viscidi R, et al: Case-control study of human papillomavirus and oropharyngeal cancer. N Engl J Med 356:1944-1956, 2007.
3. Ang KK, Harris J, Wheeler R, et al: Human papillomavirus and survival of patients with oropharyngeal cancer. N Engl J Med 363:24-35, 2010.
Originally published in ASCO Connection. © American Society of Clinical Oncology. June 26, 2026. All rights reserved.
ASCO Remembers Karnofsky Award Recipient Maura L. Gillison, MD, PhD, Pioneer in
HPV-Associated Cancers
ASCO joins the oncology community in mourning the loss of Maura L. Gillison, MD, PhD. As a medical oncologist specializing in thoracic/head and neck cancers, and as a molecular epidemiologist, Dr. Gillison definitively characterized the association between human papillomavirus (HPV) and a distinct subset of head and neck cancers starting as a graduate student. Dr. Gillison passed away on June 21, 2026; she was 61.
In recognition of her far-reaching contributions to understanding HPV-associated cancers, ASCO presented Dr. Gillison with the David A. Karnofsky Memorial Award, the Society’s highest scientific honor, in 2021. In her award lecture, Dr. Gillison provided an overview of the growing global burden of HPV-associated cancers, chronicled her major research breakthroughs about the natural history of HPV-associated cancers, and discussed her latest research, focused on understanding the effects of HPV integration into the host genome including focal genomic instability that may promote cancer development. She emphasized the ongoing challenge of screening and prevention, calling it “the greatest unmet need” in oropharyngeal cancer.
A longtime ASCO member, Dr. Gillison served as an associate editor of the Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO). Her past volunteer service includes a term on the JCO Editorial Board and track leadership positions on the Annual Meeting Education Program Committee and Annual Meeting Scientific Program Committee, among other roles.
To read more about the life of Dr. Maura Gillison and see further remembrances from friends and colleagues, visit ASCOPost.com.
Reprinted with permission from ASCO Connection, June 26, 2026.
