Julio Aguirre Ghiso

Julio A. Aguirre-Ghiso, PhD is the Rose Falkenstein Chair in Cancer Research, Professor of Cell Biology and Founding Director of the Cancer Dormancy & Tumor Microenvironment Institute at the Montefiore Einstein Cancer Center (MECC) in New York City, where he also co-directs the Gruss-Lipper Biophotonics Center and the Tumor Microenvironment and Metastasis Program at the MECC. Dr. Aguirre-Ghiso received his PhD from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1997 and was a Charles H. Revson post-doctoral Fellow at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS) until 2003. He became an Assistant Professor at SUNY-Albany the same year and since 2008 he was at ISMMS where he grew through the ranks becoming Professor in 2014 and Endowed Mount Sinai Chair of Cancer Biology in 2020. His research team led a paradigm shift, revealing novel cancer biology that diverges from the notion that cancer is perpetually proliferating. His team discovered that reciprocal crosstalk between disseminated tumor cells and the microenvironment regulates the inter-conversion between dormancy and metastasis initiation. His lab also provided a mechanistic understanding of the process of early dissemination and how it contributes to dormancy and metastatic progression and how adaptive pathways allow cancer cells to persist while quiescent. His work has been published in renowned journals and has been highly cited. He has served and actively advises different scientific and industry entities and scientific journals such as the NIH study sections where he was elected as a permanent member, the Pershing Square Sohn Research Alliance, Cancer Cell and the Metastasis Research Society among others. In 2019 he founded a new company, HiberCell and has enabled clinical approaches that seek to kill dormant cancer cells and/or induce cancer cell dormancy. He served as President Elect and then President of the Metastasis Research Society from 2018-2022 and has served at several leadership levels at AACR and other organizations.