JITC Editor-in-Chief

Michael T. Lotze, MD
University of Pittsburgh
JITC Editor-in-Chief
2024-2028

Michael T. Lotze, MD is Professor of Surgery, Immunology, and Bioengineering; Director of the DAMP Laboratories at the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center; and Sr. Advisor for the Immune Transplant and Therapy Center within the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Enterprises. His research work includes modern immunotherapy and gene therapy, dendritic cell, T cell, and cytokine therapies, and investigation of the role of mitochondria, metabolism, and unscheduled cell death in cancer. Dr. Lotze has worked in the field of immunology and clinical medicine for over 30 years and has had the opportunity to personally review and advance the work of individuals developing translational research, particularly within cancer. Dr. Lotze is a clinician scientist who has spent the last decade assembling teams to work on the extraordinary problem of pancreatic cancer, renal cancer, and lung cancer. He is a long-time SITC enthusiast, attending his first meeting in Williamsburg, presiding over the Society in 1998, and launching both the Primer on Tumor Immunology as well as the SITC Clinical Immuno-Oncology Network to advance the most rigorous and robust clinical protocols in immunotherapy of cancer. Dr. Lotze is the co-inventor of 10 patents in dendritic cell vaccines and antigen discovery, 13 patents in tumor infiltrating lymphocyte therapy (while at Iovance), additional patents at Nurix Therapeutics where he served as Chief Cell Therapy Officer 2020-2023. He is an award-winning NCI-trained scientist (1978-1990), the inaugural Director of Surgical Oncology at Pitt (1990-2000), former Vice President of Research at GlaxoSmithKline (2001), founding director of the UPCI Academy, former Chief Scientific Officer at Lion/Iovance Biotherapeutics, former CCO at Nurix Therapeutics, and innovative educator as a prolific clinician-scientist/tumor immunologist with over 500 publications and several books.

Read a recent interview with Dr. Lotze.

JITC Outgoing Editor-in-Chief

James L. Gulley, MD, PhD, FACP
National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health
JITC Interim Editor-in-Chief
2023-2024

Dr. James Gulley is an internationally recognized expert in immunotherapy for cancer. He graduated from Loma Linda University in California with a PhD in microbiology in 1994 and an MD in 1995. As part of this eight-year MD/PhD Medical Scientist Training Program, he completed a dissertation on tumor immunology. He completed his residency in Internal Medicine at Emory University in 1998, followed by a Medical Oncology fellowship at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). He has served now at the NCI for over 25 years. Dr. Gulley serves within the Center for Cancer Research (CCR) of the NCI as Co-Director of the Center for Immunology, CCR; and the Clinical Director, NCI. He has been an investigator on more than 200 clinical trials, authored 350 scientific papers or chapters which have been cited over 25,000 times, serves on a number of editorial boards and has made hundreds of scientific presentations at universities or national / international meetings. He also serves as the vice president of SITC and the interim Editor-in-Chief of JITC and has had numerous national awards including the PECASE award and the Hubert H Humphrey Award for Service to America.

JITC Deputy Editor-in-Chief

Sjoerd H. van der Burg, PhD
Oncode Institute & Leiden University Medical Center
JITC Deputy Editor-in-Chief
2024-2025

Sjoerd H. van der Burg, PhD is a full professor in Experimental Cancer Immunology and Therapy at the department of Medical Oncology of the Leiden University Medical Center and a Senior Investigator of the Oncode Institute. He leads the experimental cancer immunology and therapy group which performs fundamental, translational, and clinical studies focusing on those factors of host-tumor interactions that determine the success and failure in immune control of cancer. Dr. van der Burg has served on the JITC Editorial Board since 2013, most recently as a Section Editor of the Basic Tumor Immunology section 2021-2022 and as Interim Deputy Editor-in-Chief in 2023.