Senior Leadership Appointments at the Legorreta Cancer Center July 24, 2023
Dear Colleagues:
I’m delighted to announce the appointment of new senior leaders who have joined the Legorreta Cancer Center.
Liang Cheng, MD, MS, has joined as the Associate Director for Shared Resources. Cheng is a Professor and Vice Chair for Translational Research, Director of Anatomic Pathology and Director of Molecular Pathology in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. Dr. Cheng was recruited to Brown University from Indiana University in 2022. He is an accomplished investigator in GU cancer with world-renowned expertise in bladder cancer that contributes to the cancer burden in Rhode Island over and above most other states. In his role as Associate Director, Cheng will oversee the Cancer Center’s current and emerging shared resources to ensure that they evolve in meeting the needs of Cancer Center Members. Cheng will coordinate with shared resource leaders at the University, Lifespan and CNE to advocate for state-of-the-art technology and operations and will advise the Director on new and innovative technology. Importantly, Dr. Cheng has co-chaired the Cancer Biospecimen Bank working group at the Legorreta Cancer Center that will be under development at our collaborating institutions.
Bess Marcus, PhD, Professor of Behavioral and Social Sciences in the School of Public Health, will be joining the Legorreta Cancer Center as the interim Associate Director for Population Sciences. Dr. Marcus served as the chair of the Department of Family Medicine and Public Health at UCSD and served as the second Dean at the Brown University School of Public Health. In her new role at the Legorreta Cancer Center, Marcus will serve as chief advisor to the Director in the area of population sciences. Marcus will work with the Population Sciences Program Co-Leaders to assist in strategic planning and to encourage team science. She is NCI-funded in the area of physical activity behavior, particularly in underserved and vulnerable populations, and has published more than 300 articles on this topic. In her role as Associate Director she will oversee thematic development of behavioral sciences research and grow inter-programmatic collaborations within the Population Sciences Program.
Jeremy L. Warner MD, MS, FAMIA, FASCO is Professor of Medicine at Brown University, Director, Center for Clinical Cancer Informatics and Data Science (CCIDS), Director, COVID-19 and Cancer Consortium (CCC19) Research Coordinating Center, Editor-in-Chief, JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics, and Deputy Editor and Chief Software Architect, HemOnc.org. Dr. Warner was recruited from Vanderbilt University in 2022 and currently has multiple funded NCI grants. He joins the Legorreta Cancer Center as the Associate Director for Data Science that will foster interactions and collaborations in this area across cancer research programs and translational disease groups. The Center for Clinical Cancer Informatics and Data Science (CCIDS) will be housed within the Legorreta Cancer Center at Brown.
Please join me in warmly welcoming Liang, Bess, and Jeremy to the Legorreta team.
Wafik El-Deiry