Improving Survival in First-Line Metastatic NSCLC with Dual Checkpoint Blockade: Exploring Recent Data and Treatment Strategies / Activity 1

Narjust Florez, MD is originally from Venezuela. She completed her internal medicine residency at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School and fellowship at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where she was the chief fellow from 2018 -2019.

 

She is the Associate Director of the Cancer Care Equity Program, a thoracic medical oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Harvard Cancer Center and a Member of the Faculty at Harvard Medical School. In 2022, Dr. Florez also became the first Latina to hold an Associate Editor position in oncology as the new Associate Editor for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at the JAMA Oncology Journal.

Dr. Florez’s clinical interests include targeted therapy for lung cancer and the care of women with lung cancer, including their unique aspects of cancer survivorship. She is the principal investigator of the Sexual Health Assessment in Women with Lung Cancer (SHAWL) Study, the largest study to date evaluating sexual dysfunction in women with lung cancer.

 

Apart from her clinical interests in lung cancer, she is also a leading and productive researcher in cancer health disparities, gender and racial discrimination in medical education and medicine. Dr. Florez is one of the co-founders of the Twitter community #LatinasInMedicine, now composed of over 8,500 members globally. She received many awards, including the 2018 Resident of the Year Award by the National Hispanic Medical Association, 2019 the Mayo Brothers Distinguished Fellowship award, the 2020 Rising Star award by the LEAD national conference for women in hematology and oncology, and the 2021 International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) North America Cancer Care Team Award for outstanding clinical care.

 

In addition, Dr. Florez founded the Florez (formerly Duma) Lab in 2019. The laboratory focuses on lung cancer, social justice issues in medicine and medical education. The laboratory long-term goals are to create a welcoming environment for medical trainees from historically underrepresented groups in medicine while improving the care of vulnerable populations. Members of the Florez Lab are agents of change. Since its foundation, the Duma laboratory has received research funding from several national agencies, published over 30 studies and editorials.

 

Her work has been published in journals such as the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Nature, Cancer Cell, JAMA Oncology, Lancet Oncology, Journal of the National Cancer Institute, (amongst many others), and featured in various media outlets including The New York Times, STAT News, Healio, Onclive, Vox News, Business Insider, ASCO Post, and Doximity.

Stephen M. Schleicher, MD, MBA, is a practicing medical oncologist and the Chief Medical Officer at Tennessee Oncology, the third largest physician-owned oncology practice in the country with over 200 oncology providers practicing across 35 clinical sites of care. For medical training, Stephen was part of Harvard’s McArthur Healthcare Leadership program which included a joint internal medicine residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a fully-funded MBA from Harvard Business School. He then went on to complete oncology fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering before returning to his home town of Nashville, TN to join Tennessee Oncology. Stephen is also the immediate past President of the ACCC TN Oncology State Society where he helped lead PBM reform legislation in TN, and serves a board member of the Community Oncology Alliance.

Heather Wakelee, MD, FASCO, is a Professor of Medicine and Chief of the Division of Oncology at Stanford University, and Deputy Director of the Stanford Cancer Institute. Dr. Wakelee serves as the President of the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC); an Executive Committee member of ECOG-ACRIN, and she is a Fellow of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (FASCO).  She is a graduate of Princeton University and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and completed her post-graduate training at Stanford University.  As an experienced lung cancer investigator, Dr. Wakelee has authored or co-authored over 200 medical articles on lung cancer and thymic malignancies and is involved in dozens of clinical trials involving adjuvant therapy, immunotherapy, and anti-angiogenesis agents. Her research focuses on many specific lung cancer subtypes defined by specific mutations in EGFR, ALK, ROS1, RET, BRAF and others. Her translational efforts to date have involved collaborations with colleagues in medical oncology, thoracic radiation oncology, thoracic surgery, radiology, pulmonary medicine, and population sciences.