Organizing Medical Committee

CHAIR: Jeff Greenfield MD, PhD
Vice Chairman of Academic Affairs and Associate Professor, Department of Neurological Surgery and Pediatrics; Co-director, Children’s Brain Tumor Project
New York Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medicine, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center
CO-CHAIR: Andrés Morales La Madrid, Chief of SJD Pediatric Cancer Center Barcelona project. Clinical Director, Department of Oncology. Clinical Director, Neuro-Oncology Program. Sant Joan de Déu Children’s Hospital. Barcelona, Spain.

CO-CHAIR: Chris Jones PhD
Team Leader – Glioma Team
Professor of Childhood Brain Tumour Biology, Preclinical Chair of the International CONNECT consortium
The Institute of Cancer Research, United Kingdom
CO-CHAIR: Mariella Filbin, MD, PhD
Research Director of the Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Program, and the Co-Director of the Brain Tumor Center of Excellence at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Boston Children’s Hospital, Assistant Professor in Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Jeff Greenfield

Dr. Jeff Greenfield specializes in pediatric neurosurgery. As co-creator and first scientific director of the CBTP, Dr. Greenfield’s passion for exploring the biology of pediatric brain tumors directly extends into becoming one of the earliest adopters of precision medicine approaches for children with pediatric brain tumors. As a result, every child who receives care at Weill Cornell Medicine has their tumor analyzed by a world class team of scientists to help define a targeted treatment plan.  Dr. Greenfield has an expertise in endoscopic pediatric skull base surgery – evaluating and removing tumors of the pituitary gland region and skull base with minimally invasive tools. He is also an expert in minimally invasive ventricular endoscopy for tumors and utilizes intraoperative imaging to care for children with benign and malignant tumors of the brain and spine.

Dr. Greenfield’s research focuses on malignant transformation of gliomas, understanding how the immune system contributes to disease progression and exploring how cancer cells migrate through the brain in invasive brain tumors. Dr. Greenfield is an Associate Professor in the Department of Neurological Surgery at Weill Cornell Medicine. He received his Ph.D. from Rockefeller University and his M.D. from Weill Cornell Medical College.

Dr. Andrés Morales

Dr. Andrés Morales is a pediatric neuro-oncologist, current clinical director of the Pediatric Oncology area, leader of the Neuro-oncology Program of the Sant Joan de Déu Children’s Hospital in Barcelona, ​​and responsible for the SJD Pediatric Cancer Center Barcelona project, which will be one of the largest European centers of pediatric oncology. Since 2014 he is coordinator of the European research group on GC. He has been responsible for organizing the first international congress on GC in Paris (2015) and had an active participation in the second one in Washington (2017).

Trained in Lima (Cayetano Heredia University), Barcelona (Hospital Vall D’Hebron and Sant Joan de Déu), Chicago (University of Chicago) and Boston (Harvard University / Dana-Farber Cancer Institute), he has been a member of prestigious international medical institutions, he is author or co-author of numerous scientific research and has received numerous awards such as the ASCO Young Investigator Award in 2012.

Since 2017 Morales has been working on a phase Ib trial with dendritic cell immunotherapy in children with newly diagnosed DIPG. On the other hand, he has responsibilities for health management and clinical training at the Sant Joan de Déu Hospital in Barcelona.

Chris Jones PhD

Professor Chris Jones and his team concentrate on scanning the genome and epigenome of paediatric brain tumours. Their aim is to find the genes that are driving development of these cancers, and identifying ways to translate these findings into new treatments for children with these tumoursThe team focuses on paediatric high grade and diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma – tumours that continue to have a dismal clinical outcome. They are part of a major effort to build up the most detailed picture to date of the genome of these aggressive cancers.

Professor Jones joined The Institute of Cancer Research, London, in 2001 as a Senior Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Breast Cancer Now Toby Robins Breast Cancer Research Centre. Prior to this, he investigated the molecular genetics of different types of breast tumours at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research at University College London and the Royal Free and University College Medical School in London.

Professor Jones achieved his PhD in 1998 from the University of London, after first attaining a Bachelor of Science with First Class Honours in Toxicology and Pharmacology. He is the Translational Science Lead for international clinical trials in paediatric high grade glioma and is the founding Chair of the SIOP Europe HGG Biology Group. He is currently Preclinical Chair of the international CONNECT consortium, and Steering Committee Member of ITCC-Brain.

Professor Jones grew up in Western Australia but has lived in Texas, and completed an undergraduate research project for Sandoz Pharma in Basel, Switzerland.

Dr. Mariella Filbin

Mariella G. Filbin, MD, PhD, is a Pediatric Neurooncologist and Principal Investigator at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Boston Children’s Hospital, and an Assistant Professor in Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. Her research focuses on pediatric brain tumors, particularly high-grade gliomas and malignant embryonal brain tumors. In her studies, she is combining single-cell genetics and transcriptomics with gene editing, epigenetic, stem cell, and pharmacologic methods to identify networks underlying tumorigenesis, with the goal of establishing new druggable targets.

Dr. Filbin is the Research director of the Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Program, and the Co-director of the Brain Tumor Center of Excellence at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Boston Children’s Hospital, Co-leader of the Academy of Basic and Translational Investigation at Boston Children’s Hospital, Co-director of the Count Me In Brain Tumor Project, Co-chair of the PBTC High-grade glioma working group, and also serves on the Scientific Committee of the Pacific Neuro-Oncology Consortium and the Children’s Oncology Group High Grade Glioma working group.

She completed her initial Doctor of Medicine and Doctor of Philosophy in Vienna, Austria, before completing her pediatrics residency at Boston Children’s Hospital and her subspecialty fellowship training in pediatric hematology/oncology at Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s. She trained in the laboratories of Rosalind Segal, MD, PhD, at Dana-Farber; Todd Golub, MD, at Dana-Farber and the Broad Institute; and Mario Suva, MD, PhD, at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Filbin established her own laboratory at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in 2018.​