The Evolving Practice of Personalized Medicine

Monday, May 4
Noon
OHSU Auditorium and live-stream

Monica Bertagnolli, M.D.
17th Director of the National Institutes of Health
Richard E. Wilson Professor of Surgery Emerita, Harvard Medical School
Senior Fellow in Healthcare Policy, Harvard Kennedy School

In this talk, Dr. Bertagnolli will discuss how providing the "right care to the right patient at the right time” is changing rapidly due to better understanding of disease, improved methods of diagnosis, and more specific treatment approaches - all of this aided by advances in information technology and data science that allow us to develop approaches based on very large and diverse patient populations.

Monica M. Bertagnolli, M.D., is a surgical oncologist and cancer researcher currently serving as the Richard E. Wilson Professor of Surgery Emerita at Harvard Medical School and a Senior Fellow in Healthcare Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.  Dr. Bertagnolli was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2021 and in 2025 she was chosen to be the Academy’s 11th President, a position she will assume in July, 2026.  From November 2023 - January 2025 she was the 17th director of the National Institutes of Health. Prior to this, she was the director of the National Cancer Institute and Chief of Surgical Oncology at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. 

Throughout her career, Dr. Bertagnolli has been at the forefront of the field of translational oncology.  Her clinical practice of surgery focused on caring for people with hereditary cancer predisposition syndromes, particularly those involving gastrointestinal cancers and soft tissue sarcomas.  Her research laboratory examined the relationship between tissue inflammation and tumorigenesis, leading her to pursue clinical trials demonstrating the effects of anti-inflammatory drugs for cancer prevention and treatment. 

From 2011-2022 she served as the Group Chair of the Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology, a nationwide network addressing the needs of people with cancer by conducting clinical and translational research across many cancer types. Over the past decade, she has championed collaborative initiatives to enable a learning healthcare system by transforming the data infrastructure for clinical research, and currently serves as CEO of GHDE, a nonprofit foundation engaging health systems in collaborative research using data obtained from clinical care settings. 

She is a past President of the American Society of Clinical Oncology and has been a member of the Board of Directors of the National Cancer Society, Prevent Cancer Foundation, Natera, and Friends of Cancer Research.  Dr. Bertagnolli is a member of the Accademia Nazionale de Lincei and the American Adacemy of Achievement, and in 2023 she was awarded the title of Cavaliere, Ordine al Merito Della Repubblica Italiana. 

She graduated from Princeton University with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree and attended medical school at the University of Utah. Dr. Bertagnolli trained in surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital and was a research fellow in tumor immunology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.