Susan R. Hecht, MD

Dr. Emily J. Tsai is the Florence Irving Associate Professor of Medicine at Columbia University Vagelos Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons and an attending physician at the Center for Advanced Cardiac Care of New York-Presbyterian Hospital at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Board-certified in Cardiovascular Medicine and Advanced Heart Failure and Transplant Cardiology, Dr. Tsai specializes in caring for heart failure patients who require, or who have received, a ventricular assist device or heart transplant.Dr. Tsai is a magna cum laude graduate in engineering sciences of Harvard College and a cum laude graduate of Harvard Medical School and the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology Program. She completed internal medicine residency training at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and then cardiology fellowship and advanced heart failure and transplant cardiology training at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. As a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Awardee, Dr. Tsai completed post-doctoral basic cardiovascular research training at Johns Hopkins University in the laboratory of Dr. David A. Kass. After fellowship training, Dr. Tsai was recruited to Temple University School of Medicine as an assistant professor of medicine and physiology and a principal investigator in its Cardiovascular Research Center. In 2015, Dr. Tsai joined the faculty of Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons and established her laboratory in molecular and integrative cardiac pathophysiology. As a physician-scientist, Dr. Tsai studies the molecular and cellular biology of heart failure with the goal of developing novel therapies. Major areas of research in Dr. Tsai's laboratory include the signaling of soluble guanylyl cyclase (the nitric oxide receptor) in the heart, right heart dysfunction, and cardiac complications associated with COVID-19. Dr. Tsai has been nationally recognized for her scientific achievements by the American College of Cardiology and the Heart Failure Society of America, with their respective Presidential Career Development Award and Jay N. Cohn New Investigator in Basic Sciences Award. She has been awarded several research grants from the National Institutes of Health, American Heart Association, Foundation of Gender Specific Medicine, and the Columbia University Provost's Grants Program. Dr. Tsai has served on national committees of the American College of Cardiology, American Heart Association, and Heart Failure Society of America.

Dr. Chin Hur is both a physician and a research scientist. He is a recognized expert in cancer screening and prevention for gastrointestinal cancers and is a leader within a National Cancer Institute consortium of reseachers that work towards improving cancer management. Dr. Hur has seen thousands of patients for both clinic visits and endoscopy for cancer screening and disease monitoring. He is fully committed to providing the best care possible to each patient he sees as well as improving cancer screening and prevention through his research. His clinical and research interests keep him fully abreast of the latest technologies and improvements to patient management thereby letting him provide the most up to date care for his patients.

Dr. Fojo received his MD and PhD from the University of Miami and completed internal medicine training at Washington University School of Medicine / Barnes Hospital. He joined the National Cancer Institute in 1982 as a Clinical Associate in the Medicine Branch and after training with Drs. Ira Pastan and Michael Gottesman, became a Principal Investigator in the Medicine Branch of the National Cancer Institute. As a Principal Investigator he went on to establish a highly successful translational clinical program that began by exploring agents to reverse drug resistance, continued with work on the optimal use of Taxol®, and the development of novel microtubule-targeting agents and has focused on the development of therapies for endocrine and neuroendocrine cancers. Dr. Fojo has expertise in the management of patients with adrenocortical cancer, malignant pheochromocytoma and other neuroendocrine malignancies, and thyroid cancer. These cancers also comprise areas of very active basic science interest given their unique properties and the possibilities to target such cancers more precisely. The ultimate goal is to develop novel therapies for these often very refractory cancers so that there will be additional options available for treatment for patients with these cancers. Ongoing laboratory efforts are focused on developing such novel therapies to treat patients with adrenal cancer, pheochromocytoma and a spectrum of neuroendocrine tumors. In the laboratory Dr. Fojo has also worked to understand the molecular basis of drug resistance, and was involved in the original work relating to several ABC transporters. Additionally, his laboratory originally identified rearrangements involving the MDR-1 gene as a novel mechanism of drug resistance in several cancers, a molecular event recently demonstrated as very important in ovarian cancer. He has also been very involved in research on microtubule-targeting agents, helping to establish as a novel paradigm the interference with microtubule trafficking, rather than mitosis, for the mechanism of action for these important drugs. In addition to his clinical expertise Dr. Fojo has been very interested in the design, conduct and interpretation of oncology clinical trials and in collaboration with Wilfred Stein, PhD and Susan Bates, MD has helped to pioneer a novel method of analysis that dissects rates of tumor growth and regression as concurrent events. Related to this he has also written extensively about the cost of cancer therapeutics, the magnitude of the problem and how this might be addressed. Dr. Fojo served as Program Director for the Medical Oncology Fellowship Program at the National Cancer Institute, the largest fellowship program in the NIH and one of the largest medical oncology programs in the United States. Over the years Dr. Fojo has helped to train more than 350 medical oncologists.