Charis Eng, MD, PhD, is the Chair and Founding Director of the Genomic Medicine Institute of Cleveland Clinic, Founding Director and Attending Clinical Cancer Geneticist of the Institute’s clinical component, the Center for Personalized Genetic Healthcare, and Professor and Vice Chairman of the Department of Genetics at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. She holds a joint appointment as Professor of Molecular Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University, and is a full member of Cleveland Clinic’s Taussig Cancer Institute and a member of the CASE Comprehensive Cancer Center. She was honored by the designation National Scholar of the Davis Heart and Lung Research Institute of Ohio State University, and continues to hold an honorary appointment at the University of Cambridge. Dr. Eng’s research interests may be broadly characterized as clinical cancer genetics translational research. Her work on RET testing in multiple endocrine neoplasia type 2 and the characterization of the widening clinical spectra of PTEN gene mutations has been acknowledged as the paradigm for the practice of clinical cancer genetics.
Dr. Eng grew up in Singapore and Bristol, U.K., and entered the University of Chicago at the age of 16. After completing an MD and PhD at its Pritzker School of Medicine, she specialized in internal medicine at Beth Israel Hospital, Boston, and trained in medical oncology at Harvard’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. She was formally trained in clinical cancer genetics at the University of Cambridge and the Royal Marsden NHS Trust, U.K., and in laboratory-based human cancer genetics by Bruce Ponder, MB, PhD. At the end of 1995, Dr. Eng returned to the Farber as Assistant Professor of Medicine, and in 1999 was recruited by Ohio State University as Associate Professor of Medicine and Director of the Clinical Cancer Genetics Program. In 2001, she was honored with conferment of the Davis Professorship and appointed Co-Director of the Division of Human Genetics in the Department of Internal Medicine. In 2002, she was promoted to Professor and Division Director, and was conferred the Klotz Endowed Chair. She moved to Cleveland Clinic in 2005.
Dr. Eng has published over 260 peer-reviewed original papers in such journals as the
New England Journal of Medicine,
JAMA,
Lancet,
Nature Genetics,
Nature and
Molecular Cell. She has received numerous awards and honors including election to the American Society of Clinical Investigation, to the Association of American Physicians and as Fellow of AAAS, the Doris Duke Distinguished Clinical Scientist Award and named a Local Legend from Ohio bestowed by the American Medical Women’s Association in conjunction with the U.S. Senate on women physicians who have demonstrated commitment, originality, innovation and/or creativity in their fields of medicine. Dr. Eng is the 2005 recipient of the ATA Van Meter Award at the 13th International Thyroid Conference, the 2006 Ernst Oppenheimer Young Investigator Award of The Endocrine Society and the 2006 American Cancer Society John Peter Minton, MD, PhD, Hero of Hope Research Medal of Honor.
She was the North American Editor of the
Journal of Medical Genetics from 1998 to 2005, is Senior Editor of
Cancer Research and Associate Editor of the
Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism and of the
American Journal of Human Genetics. Dr. Eng has been elected to a 3-year term on the Board of Directors of the American Society of Human Genetics and is serving a 5-year term on the Board of Scientific Directors of the National Human Genome Research Institute beginning in Autumn 2007.
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Cleveland Clinic Researcher Discovers Two Genes Linked to Breast, Thyroid and Kidney Cancers
