Elsa R. Flores

Elsa R. Flores, Ph.D., began her scientific training in engineering before turning to cancer biology. She received her Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1994, then pursued doctoral study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she completed a Ph.D. in Cancer Biology in 1999 with her doctoral research carried out at the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research. She subsequently returned to MIT for a postdoctoral fellowship in Cancer Biology.

Her independent academic career opened at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Oncology in 2004, she progressed through the faculty ranks, receiving tenure as an Associate Professor in 2010 and becoming a full Professor with tenure in 2015. Her leadership responsibilities at MD Anderson grew alongside her research, and she served first as Co-Director and then as Director of the Genes and Development Graduate Ph.D. Program, as well as Co-Leader of the Metastasis Research Program supported by the institution's NCI Cancer Center Support Grant.

In 2016, she moved to Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida, where she was named Chair and Senior Member of the Department of Molecular Oncology, a post she held until 2022. At the same time she was appointed Professor with tenure at the University of South Florida and became Leader of the Cancer Biology and Evolution Program under Moffitt's NCI Cancer Center Support Grant. Her institutional role widened in 2022, when she took on the positions of Associate Center Director and Division Chief of Discovery Science, which she held through 2026. In that capacity she supervised six academic departments, covering Drug Discovery, Immunology, Metabolism and Physiology, Molecular Oncology, Tumor Microenvironment and Metastasis, and Bioengineering, together accounting for 59 faculty members. She helped establish Moffitt's new Department of Bioengineering in 2022 and acted as Executive Project Sponsor for the research programming, design, and construction of the Moffitt Discovery and Innovation Center at Speros.

Today Dr. Flores holds the position of Senior Member in the Department of Molecular Oncology at Moffitt Cancer Center, with secondary appointments in the Departments of Cutaneous Oncology and Thoracic Oncology. She also serves as a professor in the Department of Oncologic Sciences and the Department of Biomedical Engineering at USF Health Morsani College of Medicine. Across more than twenty years, her work has concentrated on the p53 family of tumor suppressor genes, with particular attention to how p63 and p73 contribute to cancer development, metastasis, and treatment resistance. That research has advanced scientific understanding of the way these genes govern stem cell maintenance, metabolism, and tumor progression, and it has appeared in some of the discipline's most prominent journals.