Associate Director of Translational Research – Milan Mrksich, PhD

The Associate Director for Translational Research at the Lurie Cancer Center is appointed by and reports to the director of the Lurie Cancer Center. In this roleMilan Mrksich, PhD, oversees the development and coordination of translational science across the cancer center and drives initiatives to move promising new therapies from the laboratory to the clinic.

Dr. Milan Mrksich is the Henry Wade Rogers Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Professor of Chemistry and Cell & Developmental Biology. Dr. Mrksich’s research program focuses on the development of next-generation immunotherapies based on his laboratory’s MegaMolecule platform, which enables the precise assembly of multifunctional therapeutic molecules with defined combinations of targeting, immune-modulating, and drug-delivery activities. His work seeks to create new classes of programmable therapeutics that can engage multiple biological pathways simultaneously and provide more potent and selective approaches to treating cancer and other diseases. He has previously served as Associate Director for Research Technology at the Lurie Cancer Center from 2014 to 2019 and Vice President for Research at Northwestern University from 2019 to 2023.