Bio
Nicola Amodio, Ph.D., joined the University Magna Graecia of Catanzaro (I) in 2002 as a PhD student in “Molecular Oncology”, focusing on transcription factors dysregulation in normal and malignant hematopoiesis. After a Post-Doctoral fellowship at MSKCC (NY, USA) in 2006, he returned at University of Catanzaro as a Senior Scientist, focusing on genomic and epigenomic alterations driving solid and hematologic malignancies. Since 2019, Dr. Amodio works as Assistant Professor at University Magna Graecia of Catanzaro, and he is currently in track for the position of Associate Professor of “General Pathology” at the Department of Experimental and Clinical Medicine. He serves as editor in chief for Cancers, section “cancer pathophysiology”. His current research, supported by the Italian Association for Cancer Research (AIRC), is aimed at the identification and characterization of novel druggable vulnerabilities underlying the pathogenesis and progression of plasma cell dyscrasias by using integrated functional and (epi)genomics analyses.

Bio
Eugenio Morelli, M.D., is a junior faculty (Instructor in Medicine) at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. He earned his medical degree (2011) and completed a clinical research fellowship in medical oncology (2017) at Magna Graecia University (Catanzaro, Italy). In 2017, he joined the Jerome Lipper Multiple Myeloma Center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School (Boston, MA, USA), where he has been working since then under the mentorship of Drs. Nikhil Munshi and Kenneth Anderson. Dr. Morelli's research interest is to decode the key oncogenic features of noncoding RNAs (ncRNA) to inform the development of ncRNA-based therapeutic approaches in multiple myeloma. He has a demonstrated record of accomplished and productive research projects in this area of investigation, having pioneered the use of primary miRNA therapeutics of human cancer and generated the first comprehensive map of ncRNA dependencies in myeloma. His projects are currently funded by competitive career development awards including the American Society of Hematology Scholar Fellow to Faculty Award, the International Myeloma Foundation Brian D Novis Award and the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center SPORE in Multiple Myeloma Career Enhancement Award. He is an active member of the American Society of Hematology and the International Myeloma Society, by which has been awarded the IMS Young Investigator Award 2019 and 2021.

Bio
Dr. Zadra obtained her Ph.D. in Molecular Medicine (Curriculum Molecular Oncology) from the University of Milan, Italy. In 2007, she moved to the US, where she trained as Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Her studies focused on the identification on druggable metabolic alterations responsible for prostate cancer progression and on the development of therapeutic/diagnostic approaches that exploit metabolic vulnerabilities. In 2013, Dr. Zadra became a Junior Faculty member at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. She studied the effect of systemic metabolism (modulated by unbalanced diets and obesity) on prostate cancer metabolome/epigenome during disease progression. She applied integrative metabolomics/transcriptomics/epigenomics approaches using in vitro, pre-clinical models, and clinical samples. Dr. Zadra is currently a Principal Investigator at the National Research Council of Italy. Her work is mainly focused on studying the metabolic crosstalk between tumor and TME during cancer progression. Her goal is to identify therapeutic approaches that exploit tumor-TME metabolic symbiosis/competition.

Bio
Mala Shanmugam, PhD, MS, is Associate Professor in the Department of Hematology and Medical Oncology at Emory School of Medicine. Dr. Shanmugam is a member of the Cell and Molecular Biology Research Program at Winship Cancer Institute, and the Molecular and Systems Pharmacology program at Emory Laney Graduate School's Graduate Division of Biological and Biomedical Sciences. She received her PhD in Tumor Cell Biology from Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago, Illinois. She completed her postdoctoral fellowship training at Northwestern University Medical School with Dr Steve Rosen and at Loyola University of Chicago Medical Center with Katherine Knight.