Roger Greenberg, MD, PhD

Roger Greenberg, MD, PhD, is the J. Samuel Staub, M.D. Professor in the Department of Cancer Biology and Director of the Penn Center for Genome Integrity and the Scientific Director of the Basser Center for BRCA at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. Dr. Greenberg’s laboratory investigates basic mechanisms of genome integrity maintenance and their impact on cancer etiology and response to therapy. His group discovered ubiquitin as critical to DNA damage recognition by BRCA1, biallelic mutations in BRCA1 as a cause of Fanconi Anemia, ALC1 as a new drug target in BRCA mutant cancers, and visualization of transcriptional silencing adjacent to DNA double-strand breaks. Dr. Greenberg’s group has also established methodologies to investigate nearly every step of recombination dependent telomere lengthening in real time. A more recent direction of his research involves understanding communication between the DNA damage and immune responses. Several of these fundamental discoveries from the Greenberg laboratory have been translated, inspiring clinical trials for combination chemo- and immune- therapy trials in BRCA mutant cancers.

Dr. Greenberg is a recipient of numerous awards, including the Michael Brown New Investigator Award for Basic Science, Kimmel Scholar Award in Translational Science, Charles E. Culpeper Scholarship in Medical Sciences, a Harrington Discovery Institute Scholar-Innovator Award, the Stanley N. Cohen Award for Biomedical Research, and the Memorial Sloan Kettering William L. Gerald Award. He regularly serves as a keynote speaker at international conferences and has also been elected to the American Society of Clinical Investigation and American Association of Physicians. Dr. Greenberg previously chaired the DNA Mechanisms of Cancer study section for the American Cancer Society and completed service as a member of the NIH Cancer Etiology Study Section.