The University of Alabama at Birmingham and UAB’s School of Nursing will host Friday’s Biden Cancer Summit event in Birmingham to coincide with the national summit taking place in Washington, D.C., and in cities around the country.
Matt Might, Ph.D., director of UAB’s Hugh Kaul Precision Medicine Institute, will give the Birmingham keynote presentation on the groundbreaking work that UAB and the UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center are engaging in to identify and treat cancer — and the work that must still be done.
The event, which is free and open to the public, will be at 11 a.m. Friday at the UAB School of Nursing, located at 1701 University Blvd., Birmingham, in Room NB 1054.
Representatives from the American Cancer Society, Children’s Hospital, Ronald McDonald House and other organizations will also be on hand to showcase volunteer opportunities.
Former Vice President Joe Biden and Dr. Jill Biden will host the national Biden Cancer Summit to focus on the patient’s journey from prevention through a cancer diagnosis, treatment through survivorship, and determine what must be done to accelerate progress. The summits are meant to draw attention to the progress doctors and scientists have made in treating cancer, and to highlight the work that still needs to take place.
From 2016 to 2018, Might was a strategist in the Executive Office of the President in The White House. At The White House, Might worked primarily on President Barack Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative with both the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Prior to this role, he was a faculty member in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the Harvard Medical School. At Harvard, Might’s research focused on rare disease discovery and diagnosis, and on the development of personalized therapeutics for rare disease.
At UAB, Might’s NIH and philanthropically funded research focuses on precision prevention, diagnosis and therapeutics across rare disease, cancer, and common/chronic conditions. A principal theme in his research is the use of computer and data science to enhance clinical and academic medicine.
Learn more about UAB’s Precision Medicine initiative — including more on Might’s incredible journey from computer scientist to identifying and treating his son’s potentially fatal disease — by visiting UAB’s Precision Medicine website.