UAB: Comprehensive Cancer Center

Two of the UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center's senior leaders were recently recognized by national organizations for their work in the fight against cancer.

Seng-jaw Soong, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Medicine, Director Emeritus of the Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Unit, and Associate Director Emeritus of the UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center, received a special recognition from the American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) at its recent annual meeting in Chicago for his “efforts to advance AJCC TNM (Tumor, Node, Metastasis) staging system and classification of melanoma through development of pioneering technology for the prediction of patient-specific clinical outcome,” useful for patient treatment planning and management.

Dr. Soong is internationally known for his research on melanoma, particularly in the area of statistical modeling of melanoma prognosis and staging.  As Chair of the AJCC Statistical Task Force and Vice-Chair of the Melanoma Staging Committee, Dr. Soong has played a vital role in re-shaping the criteria for staging and classification of melanoma, and also demonstrated the value of evidence-based staging that has influenced many additional cancer staging committees as well.  He continues to provide an important role in the AJCC as they move into the area of electronic staging and predictive tools, for which his contributions have been pioneering.

William E. Grizzle, M.D., Ph.D., a longtime member of the editorial board of Clinical Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), has accepted an invitation to serve as a Senior Editor of the publication.

Dr. Grizzle is a senior scientist in the Cancer Center and is director of the UAB Tissue Collection and Banking Facility, which provides tissue samples to UAB researchers. He is also a past-president of the International Society of Biological and Environmental Repositories (ISBER).

Dr. Grizzle will also be the plenary keynote speaker at the 8^th Annual Conference of the Australasian Biospecimens Network Association (ABNA) to be held in Brisbane, Australia, on December 2, 2010. He will speak on “Factors that affect the quality and usefulness of tissues in biomedical research.”