Dr. Bertagnolli is the 16th Director of the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), appointed to this position in October 2022 by President Joseph R. Biden. Prior to this, she served as the Richard E. Wilson Professor of Surgery in the Field of Surgical Oncology at Harvard Medical School, and a member of the Gastrointestinal Cancer and Sarcoma Disease Centers at Dana-Farber Brigham Cancer Center. From 2007-2018, she served as the Chief of the Division of Surgical Oncology for the BWH and the Dana-Farber Brigham Cancer Center. Dr. Bertagnolli has a background in laboratory work focusing upon understanding the role of the inflammatory response in epithelial tumor formation and has had numerous leadership roles in multi-institutional cancer clinical research consortia. From 2010-2022, she served as the Group Chair of the Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology, a nation-wide NCI-funded clinical trials group. During this time she was also the CEO of Alliance Foundation Trials, LLC, a not-for-profit corporation that conducts international cancer clinical trials. She is a past President and Chair of the Board of Directors of the American Society of Clinical Oncology and has served on the Board of Directors of the American Cancer Society and the Prevent Cancer Foundation. Dr. Bertagnolli graduated from Princeton University and attended medical school at the University of Utah. She trained in surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and was a research fellow in tumor immunology at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute.
