Lab Members

Primary Investigator

Jonathan D Licht M.D.

UF Health Cancer Center Director and The Marshall E. Rinker Senior Chair

(352) 273-8143

jdlicht@ufl.edu

ORCID: 0000-0002-3942-1369

Jonathan D. Licht, M.D., is the director of the University of Florida Health Cancer Center, holding the Marshall E. Rinker, Sr. Chair. A graduate of Columbia University College of Physician and Surgeons, he has served as director of the UF Health Cancer Center since 2015, leading it to become the 72^nd NCI-designated cancer center in June 2023.

He was a medical oncology and postdoctoral fellow at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and served for 15 years on the faculty at Mount Sinai, rising to become professor and chief of hematology/oncology before moving to Northwestern to serve as an associate director of the Robert H. Lurie Cancer Center from 2006 to 2015.

Licht’s laboratory studies aberrant epigenetic control of gene expression and as a cause of blood cancer, developing treatment strategies to reverse these processes. His research has been NCI funded for more than 30 years. He was a Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Scholar and has led a LLS Specialized Center of Research on the epigenetics of hematological malignancies since 2007.

Licht has authored more than 230 publications, cited ~35,000 times, trained dozens of students and fellows and received the 2021 ASH Mentor Award. Licht served as an associate editor of Oncogene and on the Editorial Boards of Cancer Discovery, Cancer Cell, and Blood Cancer Discovery, and he is the founding editor-in chief of Blood Neoplasia.

He has served in key positions in ASH (Finance, Councilor), AACR (Chair, Taskforce on Hematological Malignancies), and the LLS (Chair, Medical Scientific Board, Chair SCOR review committee). He served a five-year term on the NCI Board of Scientific Counselors, chaired the Biochemical Mechanisms of Cancer Therapy study section, and led the 2019 Gordon Conference on Cancer Genetics and Epigenetics. He is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the Association of American Physicians, the American Clinical and Climatological Association, and the Academy of Science Engineering and Medicine of Florida and he is a 2023 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.