I-SCORE: Investigators' and Site Coordinators' Opportunity for Research Excellence Meeting (Speaker Bios)

Jens Eickhoff, PhD is a Distinguished Scientist in the Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. He has been involved with cancer control and cancer prevention clinical trials for about 15 years. He became a MPI of the Cancer Prevention Clinical Trials Network (CP-CTNet) Data Management, Auditing, and Statistical Center (DMASC) in 2025. He serves as a co-director for the UW Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Core a Specialized Programs for Research Excellence (SPORE) Prostate Cancer grant. He has extensive experience in the design, analysis, and conduct of phase I-IV clinical trials. He has served as the lead study statistician on > 60 cancer clinical trials over the last 24 years where he has been advocating and implementing innovative study designs, including the use implementation of various types of adaptive designs for dose finding and early efficacy trials. He has served on numerous Data Safety and Monitoring Boards (DSMBs) for NIH and industry funded clinical trials.

Philip E. Castle, Ph.D., M.P.H., was appointed Director of the Division of Cancer Prevention (DCP) at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in July 2020. In this role, Dr. Castle oversees the conduct and support of research in cancer prevention, early detection, and screening, and prevention and management of symptoms and toxicities in cancer patients. DCP also is the home of the NCI Cancer Prevention Fellowship Program (CPFP), which trains future leaders in the field of cancer prevention and control, and from which Dr. Castle received his public health training from 1999 to 2002. Dr. Castle earned a Ph.D. in Biophysics in 1995 and, in conjunction with his training in the CPFP, a Master’s in Public Health in 2000, both at The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland.

Most recently, Dr. Castle was a tenured professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York, and a visiting professor at institutions in Singapore, China and Australia. Dr. Castle was previously the Chief Scientific Officer of the American Society for Clinical Pathology. Dr. Castle has been a principal investigator for more than 15 years, initiating, conducting, and leading several large NCI molecular and clinical epidemiologic research studies in the U.S. and internationally, including the Mississippi Delta Project; the HPV (Human Papillomavirus) Persistence and Progression Cohort and the Guidelines Cohort at Kaiser Permanente Northern California (KPNC); and the Anal Cancer Screening Study.

Christina Curtis, PhD, MSc is the RZ Cao Professor of Medicine, Genetics, and Biomedical Data Science, Senior Vice Chair of Research in the Department of Medicine and Director of AI and Cancer Genomics at Stanford School of Medicine. Dr. Curtis's laboratory leverages computational modeling, high-throughput molecular profiling and experimentation to develop new ways to diagnose, treat and prevent cancer. Her research has redefined the molecular map of breast cancer and led to new paradigms in understanding the origins of human cancers, as well as how they evolve and metastasize.

Dr. Curtis's accomplishments have been recognized by numerous awards, including the 2018 National Institutes of Health Director's Pioneer Award, the 2022 American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Award for Outstanding Achievement in Basic Science, the 2024 Brinker Award for Scientific Distinction in breast cancer research and 2024 AACR - Breast Cancer Research Foundation (BCRF) Award for Outstanding Achievement in Breast Cancer Research, as well as the 2025 European Society for Molecular Oncology (ESMO) Translational Award and the Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research. She is a Susan G. Komen Scholar, a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator, and a Fellow of the American Association for Cancer Research (FAACR).

Also in her research, Dr. Curtis is an influential voice in the scientific, clinical and biopharma communities. She is an advisor to multiple academic institutes, as well as to biopharma and biotech. She has served on the editorial boards of journals, spanning computational biology to precision oncology, including Science, Cancer Discovery and Molecular Cancer Research.

Dr. Leslie Ford built clinical cancer prevention research as a scientific field when few people were considering the possibility of prevention and is recognized as a national and international leader in cancer prevention research. She has a passion for prevention and strong belief that all clinical science must, to the fullest extent possible, derive as a translation of basic science. The European Institute of Oncology recognized her in 2007 for her "outstanding passion and pivotal role in creating, sustaining, and confirming the value of cancer prevention in modern oncology.

Suzanne Siminski is President and CEO of Frontier Science Foundation. She currently serves as Frontier Science sub-PI and Director of the Data Management and Reporting Unit for the Cancer Prevention Clinical Trials Network (CP-CTNet) and is the Contact MPI for the HIV/Cervical Cancer Prevention CASCADE Network Coordinating Center. She is also Frontier Science Principal Investigator for the Pediatric HIV/AIDS Cohort Study (PHACS), PHACS affiliate study “Health Outcomes around Pregnancy and Exposure to HIV/ARVs” (HOPE), and the Clinical Pharmacology Quality Assurance and Quality Control Project (CPQA), and is the Frontier Science PI of the Tuberculosis RePORT International Coordinating Center (TB-RiCC), all programs funded by the NIH. Ms. Siminski’s main research interest is in clinical trials data management, specifically in the areas of Cancer, HIV/AIDS, TB and drug use and addition. Additionally, she oversees Frontier Science’s compliance program and has interests in innovative data collection such as EMR data integration, geocoding, data sharing strategies, and data science initiatives. She has served as a project advisor for a large industry sponsored Phase III breast cancer clinical trial (OlympiA) which is being conducted throughout Europe. She also represents Frontier Science on the NIAID harmonization data repository hub initiative. As Chief Executive Officer of Frontier Science Foundation, Ms. Siminski is strategically increasing the repertoire of clinical research services provided by the organization, and actively building global collaborative partnerships with investigators around the world.