Leidos Biomedical President Named as Commencement Speaker

Feb 21, 2019

By Elena Rowe

Dmitrovsky and Chapdelaine — Leidos Biomedical Research President Ethan Dmitrovsky, M.D., and Hood President Andrea E. Chapdelaine, Ph.D., signed a partnership in May 2018.

FREDERICK, Maryland—Ethan Dmitrovsky, M.D., director of the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research and president of Leidos Biomedical Research, Inc., will deliver Hood College’s Commencement speech May 18.

Dr. Dmitrovsky leads a team of 2,200 scientists, health professionals and supporting staff members in the fight against cancer, AIDS and emerging infectious diseases.

He graduated from Harvard University and Cornell University Medical College and was an internal medicine resident at New York Hospital-Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and oncology fellow at the National Cancer Institute.

Dmitrovsky, an American Cancer Society professor, is former provost and executive vice president of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, home to undergraduate and graduate programs and more than 4,000 clinical trials. He also served as principal investigator of the Cancer Center Core Grant—MD Anderson’s largest federal grant—which was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

While working at MD Anderson, Dmitrovsky fostered collaborations with 33 sister institutions in 23 countries, including the launch of a pain medicine initiative for cancer patients in Ethiopia, a country of 90 million people and few pain specialists.

Frederick National Laboratory and Hood College partnered in 2018 to expand research and training opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students at the laboratory, and to provide professional development programs for Hood faculty and national laboratory staff. This year, they will cohost an annual scientific symposium based on the tradition of the Oncogene Meeting, held from 1985-2004 in Frederick. The meeting allowed scientists to discuss innovative new ideas for cancer research.

The Frederick National Laboratory is the only federally funded research and development center devoted entirely to the biomedical sciences. The facility is sponsored by the National Cancer Institute and operated by Leidos Biomedical Research, Inc.