News & Events

The University of Illinois Cancer Center named Jalees Rehman, MD, as the inaugural Associate Director for Translational Science, and Jeremy Johnson, PharmD, PhD, as a new Translational Oncology (TO) Research Program co-leader.

Rehman, who was a TO Program co-lead, is the Benjamin Goldberg Professor and Head of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). He directs a research group that studies the metabolism of cancer, vascular and stem cells, as well as develops novel computational approaches to study cellular heterogeneity.

Johnson, who was a member of the TO Program, is Professor and Associate Head for Research in the Department of Pharmacy Practice at the Retzky College of Pharmacy at UIC. His research focuses on the translational development of experimental therapeutics, with a particular emphasis on phytochemicals.

The Cancer Center is part of UIC and its academic health system, UI Health.

Johnson joins fellow TO co-lead Aslam Ejaz, MD, MPH, who is Chief of the Surgical Oncology Program at UI Health and specializes in the treatment of pancreatic, liver and bile duct cancers, along with other gastrointestinal cancers. 

The TO Program brings together teams of investigators who conduct research along the translational continuum, ranging from mechanistic studies to the validation of therapeutic targets and disease biomarkers for cancer therapy and chemoprevention, to clinical trials that explore opportunities for personalized medicine.

The TO program is 1 of 3 research programs at the Cancer Center. Cancer Biology and Cancer Prevention and Control are the others.