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Program Leadership

  • Jill P. Mesirov, PhD

    Jill P. Mesirov, PhD

    Professor of Medicine
    Associate Vice Chancellor, Computational Health Sciences

    Mesirov Lab 

    As associate vice chancellor, Dr. Mesirov is responsible for the overarching strategy for computational health sciences and research computing at UC San Diego School of Medicine. Before moving to UCSD in 2015, Mesirov was associate director and chief informatics officer at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, formerly the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research, where she directed the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Program. Dr. Mesirov has more than twenty years of progressive leadership in computational biology and analysis of complex genome-scale cancer datasets to determine the underlying biological mechanisms of specific tumor subtypes, stratify patients according to their relative risks of relapse, and identify candidate compounds for new treatments.. Her laboratory also develops software (GenePattern and GenePattern Notebook, Gene Set Enrichment Analysis and the Integrative Genomics Viewer) that brings advanced computational methods to the non-programming cancer biologist. These tools have almost 500,000 registered users worldwide and over 20,000 citations in the literature. Dr. Mesirov, a former president of the Association for Women in Mathematics, is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Mathematical Society (AMS), the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM), and the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB).
  • Jason Sicklick, MD, FACS

    Jason Sicklick, MD, FACS

    Professor of Surgery
    Adjunct Professor of Pharmacology
    Executive Vice Chair of Research, Department of Surgery
    Associate Program Director, General Surgery Residency Program, UC San Diego, School of Medicine
    Lead, Sarcoma Disease Team, UC San Diego, Moores Cancer Center

    Dr. Sicklick is an R01-funded investigator who specializes in (1) the treatment of complex retroperitoneal and abdominal sarcomas—in particular, gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GIST) and (2) hepatobiliary oncology. Dr. Sicklick has received many accolades for his contributions to advancing GIST treatments, which include the 2021 Rare Impact Award from the National Organization for Rare Disorders (NORD). He has co-authored over 130 peer-reviewed articles, and the findings of his research have appeared in Nature Medicine, Nature, and Gastroenterology.