ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2021
The Young Physician-Scientist Awards (YPSA) recognize physician-scientists who are early in their first faculty appointment and have made notable achievements in their research.
About the awardee
Benjamin Izar, MD, PhD, is a medical oncologist Assistant Professor of Medicine at Columbia University. He received an MD/PhD at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen Germany. He did his internal medicine residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, oncology fellowship at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and a post-doctoral fellowship at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (Mentor: Dr. Levi Garrway, then Dr. Kai Wucherpfennig) and the Broad Institute (Dr. Aviv Regev).
His laboratory program at Columbia focuses on understanding tumor heterogeneity and how this impacts response and resistance to immune and oncogene-targeted therapies. Dr. Izar's laboratory has a particular interest in developing and clinically implementing single-cell genomics technologies to address critical questions in patient care. He received several honors, including the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award for Medical Scientists, the American Association for Cancer Research NextGen star award, a NCI K08 and a NCI R37 MERIT award.