Joe W. Ramos

Dr. Ramos comes to the Louisiana Cancer Research Center from the University of Hawaii at Mānoa where he has held various leadership positions including Deputy Director and, most recently, Interim Director. The University of Hawaii Cancer Center has had continuous NCI designation for 25 years and has a deep history of engagement in health disparities and clinical research.

Dr. Ramos is a respected expert on cancer signaling and metastasis. His lab’s mission is to determine the underlying mechanisms that support cancer progression and to use this knowledge in drug discovery. His focus is on brain, kidney and skin cancers and developing drugs leads to block growth and invasion of these tumors. He holds two patents in this area and this work has been published in top scientific journals.

Dr. Ramos serves on several national and international grant review boards and is an editor at the journal Plos One. His work has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the American Cancer Society, and the U.S. Department of Defense, among others. He received his PhD in cell biology from the University of Virginia Medical School in Charlottesville, Virginia and did his post-doctoral research at The Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California.

Scientific collaboration is a strength of the LCRC which was established by the Louisiana Legislature to facilitate research among its member institutions.