Distinguished Scientist Director's Lecture Series | Julio Aguirre-Ghiso, PhD

Event details Date: Wednesday, September 9, 2026 Time: 4:30 PM to 5:30 PM Location: Goldberg Auditorium, Moores Cancer Center Type: Lecture / Workshop About this event The Molecular Logic of Cancer Cell Dormancy: Lessons from the Niche Julio A. Aguirre-Ghiso, PhD is the Rose C. Falkenstein Chair in Cancer Research, Professor of Cell Biology and Medicine and Founding Director of the Cancer Dormancy Institute at the Montefiore Einstein Comprehensive Cancer Center (MECCC) in New York City, where he also co-directs the Gruss-Lipper Biophotonics Center and the Tumor Microenvironment and Metastasis Program at the MECCC. 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. The same year he became an Assistant Professor at SUNY-Albany/Wadsworth Center 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 how interactions between disseminated tumor cells and their microenvironment regulate the switch between dormancy and metastasis initiation. His lab also provided a mechanistic understanding of the process of early dissemination and revealed how it contributes to dormancy and metastatic progression and how stress adaptive pathways allow cancer cells to persist while quiescent. His work highlighted a new role for myeloid cells in cancer dissemination and lung cancer initiationand his team found that an unexpected function of innate immune cells is to induce dormancy to prevent metastasis. His current research examines dormancy in rare cancers like uveal melanoma and how factors such as aging, viral infections, and clonal hematopoiesis trigger dormant cancer cells to awaken and metastasize. His research, published in top journals, is highly cited, ranking him among the top 1-5% of scientists by h-index. He has served and actively advises different scientific and industry entities and scientific journals via advisory board or scientific council membership such as the NIH study sections where he was elected as a permanent member, the Pershing Square Sohn Research Alliance, Cancer Cell and the Scientific Council of the French National Cancer Institute. 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 amongother organizations. In 2019, he founded HiberCell, a company developing therapies targeting stress signaling pathways to eliminate both proliferative and dormant cancer cells. This led to two FDA fast-tracked drugs. He also repurposed FDA-approved drugs for an innovative early metastatic prostate cancer trial. These achievements demonstrate his impact from ba Official event details: https://calendar.ucsd.edu/event/distinguished-scientist-directors-lecture-series-julio-aguirre-ghiso-phd