Dr. Whiteside received both her MA and PhD degrees in Microbiology from Columbia University, New York, NY. She is a Diplomate of the American Board of Medical Laboratory Immunology (1979). She was as a Fogarty Senior International Fellow at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in Lausanne, Switzerland (1984-85). At the University of Pittsburgh, Dr. Whiteside rose through the faculty ranks to become Professor of Pathology with secondary appointments as Professor of Immunology and Otolaryngology (1989-present). She served as Director of the Immunologic Monitoring and Cellular Products Laboratory (IMCPL) at the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center for 25 years. Dr. Whiteside’s translational research has been focused on mechanisms of tumor-induced immunosuppression, cytokine networks, development of anticancer vaccines, immunobiology of human tumors and the role of natural immunity in the control of cancer progression. She studies mechanisms of tumor escape from the host immune system and the development of therapies designed to eliminate tumor escape in patients with HNC, melanoma, breast carcinoma and hematological malignancies. Most recently, she has been investigating tumor-derived exosomes (TEX) and their role in cancer-induced immune suppression. Dr. Whiteside has authored 650 peer-reviewed papers and 180 chapters and review articles. She devotes much of her time to training young physicians in doing research in cancer immunology and maintains scientific collaborations with many former students. Her current research is supported by two awards from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). She received a Honoris causa degree in Medicine from The Poznan Medical University in Poland in 2011 and was awarded a Richard V. Smalley Memorial Award by the Society of Immunotherapy of Cancer in 2012.