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Dr. Robert Diasio is currently Director of the Mayo Clinic Cancer Center in Rochester, Minnesota. Immediately prior to this, he was Professor of Medicine (Hematology/Oncology), Pharmacology & Toxicology, and Genetics at the University of Alabama School of Medicine in Birmingham, Alabama where he held the positions of Chairman of the Department of Pharmacology & Toxicology, Director of the Division of Clinical Pharmacology, and Associate Director of the UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center. In 1993, Dr. Diasio was named as the first holder of the Newman H. Waters Chair in Clinical Pharmacology.
Dr. Diasio received his undergraduate degree from the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York and M.D. degree from Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut in 1971. Following clinical training at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, Dr. Diasio was a Fellow in Medical Oncology and subsequently Clinical Pharmacology at the National Cancer Institute. From 1976 until 1984, Dr. Diasio served initially as Assistant Professor and subsequently as Associate Professor in the Departments of Medicine and Pharmacology at the Medical College of Virginia. In 1984 he was appointed Professor of Medicine and Pharmacology and Director of the Division of Clinical Pharmacology at University of Alabama School of Medicine. In 1989, he assumed the position of Chairman of the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology. In 1998, he was appointed Associate Director of the UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center. In 2006, he left UAB to become Director of the Mayo Clinic Cancer Center in Rochester, Minnesota.
Dr. Diasio is the author of more than 150 manuscripts, and numerous invited reviews. He has authored chapters on clinical pharmacology in several textbooks including the 20th, 21st, and 22nd ed. Cecil Textbook of Medicine, 9th ed. of Goodman & Gilman’s Textbook of Pharmacology - The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics, and in the 6th and upcoming 7th ed. of Holland and Frei Cancer Medicine. Dr, Diasio has been the recipient of continuous funding from the National Cancer Institute since 1978 and is the recipient of the highly competitive MERIT award. He currently serves on several editorial boards, including Cancer Research, Clinical Cancer Research, Journal of Clinical Oncology and Clinical Colorectal Cancer.
Dr. Diasio has been a member of the NIH Experimental Therapeutics I Study Section, the NCI Cancer Center Study Section, which he chaired for two years, and most recently the Developmental Therapeutics Study Section. He is an active member of several academic societies, including the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the American Association for Cancer Research, and the American Society of Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics. In 1989, he was elected as a member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation and in 1998, he was elected to the American Association of Physicians. His clinical interest is in the area of gastrointestinal oncology and his research has been focused mainly in the area of biochemical, molecular, and clinical pharmacology of anticancer agents with a particular interest in antimetabolites, oligonucleotides and gene therapy, and more recently targeted therapy as therapeutic approaches.
Dr. Diasio has made a number of important contributions in various areas, including pharmacogenetics/pharmacogenomics, pyrimidine catabolism, and antisense pharmacology. His current research interests continue to focus in these areas as well as in the evaluation of novel therapeutic approaches for modulation of gene expression and development of clinically relevant methods to assess the expression of genes important in cancer development and response to therapy. | 