President-Elect: 2026-2027
Vonderheide is director of the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania and the John H. Glick, MD, Abramson Cancer Center’s Director Professor in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine. He is vice dean for cancer programs at the Perelman School of Medicine; vice president of cancer programs and lead physician for the cancer service line for the University of Pennsylvania Health System; and president of the Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute.
Vonderheide is an internationally renowned cancer immunotherapy and translational research expert. Through his integration of basic and clinical investigations, he has advanced the establishment of cancer treatment strategies and defined the immunobiology of tumor microenvironments using genetically engineered laboratory models. Over the course of his career, he has deciphered mechanisms of cancer immune surveillance and developed novel immunotherapeutics—such as vaccines, antibody-based therapies, and adoptive T-cell therapies—for patients with pancreatic cancer, melanoma, and breast cancer. He is well recognized for driving the development of agonist CD40 antibodies, now in clinical trials as potential immunotherapeutics across many types of cancers. Vonderheide discovered that telomerase is a universal tumor antigen and has led efforts to develop telomerase vaccination for both cancer therapy and the prevention of cancer in healthy individuals, and he has helped lead a team to show that stereotactic radiation therapy in combination with dual checkpoint blockade represents a synergistic path for immune activation in cancer. More recently, he has investigated the potential of KRAS inhibition to intercept pancreatic cancer.
Vonderheide has been a member of AACR since 2005 and was elected as a Fellow of the AACR Academy in 2025. He served with distinction as a member of the AACR Board of Directors from 2022-2025 and was program chair of the AACR Annual Meeting 2023.
Vonderheide has contributed significantly to various AACR committees, journals, and scientific conferences over the years. He is currently a member of the AACR Science Policy & Government Affairs Committee and serves as chair of the AACR Trailblazer Cancer Research Grants Scientific Review Committee. He was chair of the AACR Lifetime Achievement Award in Cancer Research Selection Committee (2024) and chair of the PanCAN-AACR Pancreatic Cancer Research Grants Scientific Review Committee (2012-2014). A member of the AACR Cancer Immunology Working Group (CIMM) since 2006, Vonderheide served as AACR CIMM chair in 2013-2014 and on the AACR CIMM Leader Nomination Committee in 2018. He was a member of the AACR-MPM Transformative Cancer Research Grants Scientific Review Committee (2019-2020), AACR-Cancer Research Institute Lloyd J. Old Award Selection Committee (2012-2013), AACR Publications Committee (2011-2014), and AACR Cancer Progress Report Steering Committee (2011).
Vonderheide currently serves on the editorial board of the AACR journal Cancer Discovery. He was previously a deputy editor of the AACR journal Cancer Immunology Research (2012-2025) and on the editorial boards of the AACR journals Clinical Cancer Research (2003-2014) and Cancer Research (2009-2012).
He was cochair of the AACR-Cancer Vaccine Consortium Cancer Vaccine Think Tank (2025-2026), cochair of the AACR Special Conference on Pancreatic Cancer (2016, 2021, 2022), cochair of the AACR Special Conference on Tumor Immunology (2016), and cochair of the AACR Annual Meeting Program Committee (2015).
Vonderheide was elected as a member of the National Academy of Medicine in 2023 and has received numerous other awards and honors throughout his career, including the Jill Rose Award for Scientific Achievement from the Breast Cancer Research Foundation (2025), the Breakthrough Challenge Zent Family Award (2024), and the DuPont Guerry Award for Outstanding Mentorship (2016) and William Osler Patient Oriented Research Award (2012), both from the University of Pennsylvania. He was the co-leader of the Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C)-Lustgarten Foundation Pancreatic Cancer Convergence Dream Team and the leader of a New Therapies Challenge Research Team funded under the Pancreatic Cancer Collective, a strategic partnership between the Lustgarten Foundation and SU2C. AACR is the Scientific Partner of SU2C.
Vonderheide earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Notre Dame, his doctoral degree in immunology from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and his medical degree from Harvard Medical School. He completed his medical training at Massachusetts General Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
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