Eric Winer named Gilman Professor of Medicine and Pharmacology
Dr. Eric P. Winer, an internationally renowned expert in breast cancer who was recently appointed director of the Yale Cancer Center (YCC), has also been named the Alfred Gilman Professor of Medicine and Pharmacology, effective immediately.
He became YCC director and physician-in-chief of Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale New Haven Hospital on Feb. 1, 2022.
Dr. Winer has led and collaborated on innumerable clinical trials that have changed the face of breast cancer treatment. His work is both broad and deep, and it has touched almost all aspects of the disease.
Before coming to Yale, he was the Thompson Chair in Breast Cancer Research, chief clinical development officer, and senior vice president for medical affairs at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. He also served as the director of the Breast Cancer Program at Dana-Farber, a position he held for 24 years.
After graduating from Yale College in 1978, Dr. Winer received his medical degree from Yale School of Medicine in 1983 and completed training in internal medicine, serving as chief resident at Yale New Haven Hospital. He completed fellowship training in hematology/oncology at Duke University School of Medicine and served on the Duke faculty from 1989 to 1997, before joining Dana-Farber and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
He has authored more than 350 original manuscripts and has served as the principal investigator of a National Institutes of Health-funded SPORE in Breast Cancer for the last 10 years. He led the first preoperative trial which foreshadowed the extensive research he has conducted in HER2-positive breast cancer over the past two decades. His ongoing research and clinical trials investigate novel pharmacologic and biologic agents that target specific pathways in cancer cells with the hope of finding new therapies that will not only treat breast cancer but also prevent recurrences.
Dr. Winer is also the incoming president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, and an elected member of the Association of American Physicians. For more than a decade, he served as the chief scientific advisor and chair of the Scientific Advisory Board for Susan G. Komen for the Cure. Until recently he was also co-chair of the National Cancer Institute Breast Cancer Steering Committee. Well known for his mentorship, he received the Edward J. Benz Award for Advancing the Careers of Women Faculty from the Committee for Women Faculty and Office of Faculty Development of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in 2013. In 2020, he received the William Silen Lifetime Achievement in Mentoring Award from Harvard Medical School. He has also received numerous awards for his breast cancer research, most notably the William L. McGuire Memorial Lecture Award in 2016 at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.
