IACS Leadership
Senior Associate Director, Target Validation
Joseph R. Marszalek, Ph.D.
Prior to joining MD Anderson, Joseph Marszalek, Ph.D., led target validation and drug discovery groups at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. These groups were critical elements of major collaborations with Sanofi-Aventis and Merck. As part of these collaborations, activities from multiple internal and external groups were successfully integrated to enable programs to advance through key pipeline milestones.
Prior to Dana-Farber, he was with Merck Research Laboratories, where he led or was a key member of numerous programs that spanned therapeutic areas and the drug discovery pipeline from early target discovery through compounds in Phase I clinical trials. While Marszalek has a broad range of expertise that crosses many functional and tumor biology areas, much of his oncology research has focused on identifying and validating novel oncology candidates for the development of targeted therapies. In addition, a major focus has been to understand how the tumor microenvironment affects response and confers resistance to therapeutic candidates.
He received his Ph.D. in biomedical sciences from the University of California at San Diego in the laboratory of Larry Goldstein, Ph.D., and completed his post-doctoral research in the laboratory of Harvey Lodish, Ph.D., at the Whitehead Institute at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Institute Leadership
- Giulio Draetta, M.D., Ph.D. - Director
- Lynda Chin, M.D. - Scientific Director
- Carlo Toniatti, M.D., Ph.D. - Head of Research
- Philip Jones, Ph.D. - Head of Drug Discovery
- Eric Devroe, Ph.D. - Executive Director, Strategic Alliances
- Jannik Andersen, Ph.D. - Senior Associate Director, Drug Discovery Biology
- Joseph Marszalek, Ph.D. - Senior Associate Director, Target Validation
- Timothy Heffernan, Ph.D. - Associate Director, Target Discovery
- James Horner, B.S. - Associate Director, Mouse Cancer Models
- Ming-Kuei Jang, Ph.D., - Associate Director, Neurobiology
- Alexei Protopopov, Ph.D. - Associate Director, Oncogenomics
- Jianhua (John) Zhang, Ph.D. - Associate Director, Bioinformatics