Elsa R. Flores

Elsa R. Flores, Ph.D., has spent close to thirty years working at the intersection of laboratory discovery, bioengineering, academic leadership, and the training of new scientists. A translational cancer researcher, she currently holds the position of Senior Member in the Department of Molecular Oncology at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida, with secondary appointments in the Departments of Cutaneous Oncology and Thoracic Oncology. She additionally serves as a professor in the Department of Oncologic Sciences and the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of South Florida (USF) Health Morsani College of Medicine. The scientific core of her career lies in the p53 family of tumor suppressor genes. For more than two decades she has studied how p63 and p73 in particular affect the development of cancer, its spread to distant sites, and its resistance to treatment. Her research has expanded what the field understands about the part these genes play in stem cell maintenance, metabolism, and tumor progression, and her results have appeared in some of the discipline's most prominent journals. Her academic foundation was laid at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), from which she graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering in 1994. A doctoral degree followed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she completed a Ph.D. in Cancer Biology in 1999 and conducted her research at the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research. She then took up a postdoctoral fellowship in Cancer Biology at MIT.