Maura L. Gillison MD, PhD

Maura L. Gillison, MD, PhD, is Professor of Medicine and a CPRIT scholar at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. She is a head and neck medical oncologist and molecular epidemiologist. Her laboratory focuses on the role of human papillomavirus (HPV) infection in head and neck malignancies. Her work ranges from cohort studies of oral HPV infection to genetic indicators of response to chemoradiotherapy and immunotherapy.

Dr. Gillison is a physician scientist who has made significant contributions to the identification of human papillomavirus as a cause of a distinct subset of head and neck cancer, resulting in a paradigm shift in concepts for risk, diagnosis and therapy of head and neck cancer. As a doctorate-level trained molecular epidemiologist and medical oncologist with expertise in head and neck cancer, she currently investigates the implications of her findings for primary and secondary prevention strategies, diagnostics, prognostics, genomics, molecular and immune-therapeutics, clinical decision making and population-level cancer incidence trends in the United States and worldwide.
Dr. Gillison earned her MD from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, then served successively as a postdoctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, as a medical resident at Massachusetts General Hospital, and as a clinical fellow and later as a senior clinical fellow in oncology at Johns Hopkins before earning her PhD from that University’s School of Hygiene and Public Health. She rose to the rank of Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine before serving for eight years as the Jeg Coughlin Chair of Cancer Research at The Ohio State University until moving to MD Anderson.

Dr Gillison is supported by grants from CPRIT and has published extensively in such prestigious journals as The New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and Journal of Clinical Oncology. She has received the Giants of Cancer Care Award in Translation and the David Karnovsky Award from ASCO in 2021. She is a member of ASCI, the Association of American Physicians and the National Academy of Medicine.

Dr. Gillison serves as a member of the NCCN Head and Neck Cancers Panel.