Dr. Chinnaiyan received his M.D., Ph.D. degrees at the University of Michigan in 1999. He did his graduate work under Dr. Vishva Dixit where he identified and cloned several important mediators of the cell death (apoptosis) pathway including FADD, FLICE (caspase-8) and DR-3 (Death Receptor-3) and completed his core medical training in Clinical Pathology. Dr. Chinnaiyan is the S.P. Hicks Endowed Professor of Pathology and Associate Professor of Urology at the University of Michigan Medical School. He is co-Director of the Division of Pathology Informatics and Director of the Cancer Bioinformatics Core. His laboratory is focused on using genomic, proteomic, and bioinformatic approaches to dissect and understand cancer for the purposes of understanding cancer biology as well as discover biomarkers. He and his collaborators have characterized a number of biomarkers of prostate cancer including AMACR, EZH2 and hepsin. Most recently, his laboratory identified recurrent gene fusions of TMPRSS2 to ETS family transcription factors in prostate cancer, potentially redefining the molecular basis of prostate cancer as well as other common epithelial cancers. His laboratory developed the popular cancer profiling bioinformatics resource called Oncomine (www.oncomine.org). He has received a number of prestigious awards including the Pew Biomedical Scholar Award, the Amgen Outstanding Investigator Award, the Dean’s Basic Science Research Award, and the Benjamin Castleman Award and a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Clinical Scientist Award in Translational Research. Dr. Chinnaiyan has more than 100 publications to his credit, holds several U.S. patents, and is funded by the National Institutes of Health, the American Cancer Society, and the Department of Defense.