Leadership

Dr. Nelson serves as the Marion I. Knott Director of the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center (SKCCC) and the Department of Oncology the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine since 2008. At the SKCCC, he is responsible for oversight of approximately $400M in revenues from clinical care, research, teaching, and intellectual property licensing. He earned a B.A. in Chemistry at Yale University in 1980, and both an M.D. and a Ph.D. in Pharmacology in from Johns Hopkins in 1987. After completing internal medicine residency and medical oncology fellowship training at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, he joined the Johns Hopkins faculty in 1992 and rose to the rank of Professor of Oncology, Urology, Pathology, Pharmacology, Medicine, Radiation Oncology, and Environmental Health Sciences.

A trained genitourinary medical oncologist, Dr. Nelson has long directed a research laboratory focused on elucidating mechanisms of prostate cancer development in order to create new strategies for prostate cancer diagnosis, detection, treatment and prevention. His laboratory discovered one of the very first epigenetically-silenced genes in all of human cancer, GSTP1, which is inactivated in nearly all prostate cancer cases. Assays for abnormal DNA methylation near GSTP1, marketed by MDxHealth (MDXH; Brussels) as ‘ConfirmDx’ tests, have now been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration as adjuncts to prostate cancer diagnosis, the first epigenetic laboratory tests in widespread common use. He has authored more than 250 published works, garnered nearly 30,000 citations, been granted 10 patents, and earned several prizes and honors.

Outside of Johns Hopkins, Dr. Nelson has become a recognized leader in cancer research, organizing national and international meetings in cancer health disparities, cancer prevention, and prostate cancer, and serving on the Board of the V Foundation, as a Scientific Co-Chair for Stand Up to Cancer, and on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Prostate Cancer Foundation. He is also the Executive Editor of Cancer Today, a major lay-oriented cancer periodical. He has been a Member of the Cancer Scientific Advisory Council for AbbVie, Inc. (ABBV; NYSE), and the Scientific Advisory Board for ProQuest Investments, Inc.; he has served as an ad hoc consultant for GlaxoSmithKline, Inc. (GSK; NYSE), Merck and Co. (MRK; NYSE), and Celgene (CELG; NASDAQ). Dr. Nelson is a Co-Founder and Medic al Advisory Board Member for Digital Harmonics, a medical device and defense industry company.