Dr. Hua Yu is Co-Leader of Cancer Immunotherapeutics Program, City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center and Billy and Audrey L. Wilder Professor of the Department of Cancer Immunotherapeutics and Tumor Immunology. Dr. Yu is a noted expert and pioneer on the cancer-promoting protein STAT3 and was the first to uncover and define the protein’s effect on the immune cells in tumors. Dr. Yu’s studies have laid the foundation for a new generation of molecular targeted cancer therapy approaches that disable both tumor cells and the tumor-promoting stromal cells. She is developing potentially paradigm-shifting new classes of drugs to inhibit STAT3 and other critical-yet-challenging cancer targets. Dr. Yu received her bachelor’s and doctoral degrees from Columbia University. She completed fellowships with the American Cancer Society and the National Institutes of Health, and also was a faculty fellow at Columbia University. The fundamental discoveries from her laboratory have been well supported continuously by grants from the National Institutes of Health. Her recent studies have been published extensively in such prestigious biomedical/cancer research journals as Nature Medicine, Cancer Cell, Nature Biotechnology and Nature Reviews Cancer and Nature Reviews