Steven Yip MD, MSc, FRCPC

Medical Oncologist
Medical Lead, Precision Oncology and Experimental Therapeutics
Chair, Southern Alberta GU Tumour Group
Clinical Associate Professor, Department of Oncology, Cumming School of Medicine
Staff Medical Oncologist, Arthur JE Child Comprehensive Cancer Centre
Calgary, AB

Dr. Steven Yip is a Staff Medical Oncologist at the Arthur JE Child Comprehensive Cancer Centre in Calgary, Alberta. He is the Southern Alberta GU Tumour Group Chair, Medical Lead of Precision Oncology and Experimental Therapeutics (POET), and Southern Alberta Prostate Cancer Research Institute (APCaRI) Co-Chair. He is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Calgary. He has an academic focus on translational research, PSMA PET/CT imaging and novel radiopharmaceutical drug development in advanced prostate cancer. He completed his medical oncology clinical and translational research genitourinary fellowship, under the supervision of Dr. Kim Chi at BC Cancer. He received his MD at the University of Alberta and trained at the University of British Columbia and the University of Calgary. He has a Masters of Science in Health Research Methodology from McMaster University.

Key Publications: 

Reimers MA, Yip SM (Co-First Authors), Zhang L, Cieslik M, Dhawan M, Montgomery B, Wyatt AW, Chi KN, Small EJ, Chinnaiyan AM, Alva AS, Feng FY, Chou J. Clinical Outcomes in Cyclin-dependent Kinase 12 Mutant Advanced Prostate Cancer. Eur Urol. 2019. In Press.

Yip SM, Wells C, Moreira RB, Wong A, Srinivas S, Beuselinck B, Porta C, Sim HW, Ernst S, Rini BI, Yuasa T, Basappa NS, Kanesvaran R, Wood LA, Soulieres D, Canil CM, Kapoor A, Fu SY, Choueiri TK, Heng DYC. Checkpoint Inhibitors in Metastatic Renal Cell Carcinoma Patients (mRCC): Results from the International Metastatic Renal Cell Carcinoma Database Consortium (IMDC). Cancer. 2018;124(18):3677-83.

Herberts C, Murtha AJ, Fu S, Wang G, Schönlau E, Xue H, Lin D, Gleave A,Yip SM, Angeles A, Hotte S, Tran B, North S, Taavitsainen S, Beja K, Vandekerkhove G, Ritch E, Warner E, Saad F, Iqbal N, Nykter Matti, Gleave ME, Wang Y, Annala M, Chi KN, and Wyatt AW. Activating AKT1 and PIK3CA mutation in metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer. Eur Urol. 2020. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eururo.2020.04.058

Jette N, Kumar M, Radhamani S, Arthur G, Goutam S, Yip SM, Kolinsky M, Williams G,

Bose P, Lees-Miller S. ATM-deficient cancers provide new opportunities for precision oncology. Cancers. Cancers (Basel). 2020 Mar 14;12(3). pii: E687. doi: 10.3390/cancers12030687

Yip SM, Loewen SK, Li H, Hao D, Easaw JC. Management of Medical Oncology Services in Canada: Redefined Workload with a Novel Supply-and-Demand Workforce Projection Model. J Oncol Pract. 2018;14(7):e438-e445.

Yip SM, Kaiser J, Li H, North S, Heng DY, Alimohamed NS. Real World Outcomes in Advanced Urothelial Cancer and the Role of Neutrophil to Lymphocyte Ratio. Clin Genitourin Cancer. 2018;16(3):e637-e644.

Yip SM, Ruiz Morales J, Donskov F, Fraccon A, Umberto B, Rini BI, Lee JL, Bjarnason G, Sim HW, Beuselinck B, Kanesvaran R, Brugarolas J, Koutsoukos K, Fu SYF, Yuasa T, Davis I, Alva A, Kollmannsberger C, Choueiri TK, Heng DYC. Outcomes of Metastatic Chromophobe Renal Cell Carcinoma (chrRCC) in the Targeted Therapy Era: Results from the International Metastatic Renal Cell Cancer Database Consortium (IMDC). Kidney Cancer J.2017;1(1):41-47.

Dr Bahlis is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Calgary in the division of Hematology and Bone Marrow Transplantation and a member of the Charbonneau Cancer Research Institute. Dr Bahlis received his medical degree in 1995 from St Joseph University – French Faculty of Medicine in Beirut. He then completed his internal Medicine residency at the State University of New York in Syracuse followed by a Hematology-Oncology fellowship at the University of Miami, Florida. Dr Bahlis also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in cancer biology at the University of Miami under the mentorship of Dr Lawrence Boise. Dr Bahlis’ clinical and laboratory research focus on the study of plasma cell dyscrasia, with particular interest in multiple myeloma genomics, drug resistance and the development of novel therapeutics. He has received several awards and research funding from numerous agencies including the ASCO young investigator award, the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, Alberta Cancer Foundation, the National Institute of Health, the Terry Fox Foundations and the Canadian Institute of Health and Research (CIHR). His research work was published in many peer-reviewed journals including New England Journal of Medicine, Nature Medicine, Cancer Cell, Blood, Journal of Clinical Oncology, Leukemia, Molecular Cancer Research and Clinical Cancer Research. Dr Bahlis also served on the editorial board as reviewer for the journal Blood and on the review panels of several national and international funding agencies. Dr Bahlis also served on the American Society of Hematology plasma cell dyscrasia scientific committee and the international myeloma society (IMS) education panels. He is currently serving as an associate editor for the Blood journal.

Dr. Ali Bashashati is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Pathology and School of Biomedical Engineering at UBC, and Director of Artificial Intelligence and Bioinformatics Research in the Ovarian Cancer Research Program. Dr. Bashashati’s research area lies at the interface between computational, engineering and biomedical sciences. He is interested in developing machine-learning algorithms to combine various sources imaging, digital pathology and ‘omics data in the context of cancer. Dr. Bashashati aims to improve pathology efficiency, identify new biomarkers for treatment selection and derive biological insights for various health conditions with major emphasis on cancer. He has published extensively in cancer genomics, bioinformatics and computational biology and his papers have appeared in top-tier journals such as Nature, Nature Genetics and Nature Medicine.

Dr. Julia Burnier is an Associate Professor in the Gerald Bronfman Department of Oncology and Department of Pathology at McGill University (Montréal, Canada) and a Scientist at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC). She is Director of the Liquid Biopsy laboratory within the Cancer Research Program (CRP) of the RI-MUHC and studies the role of tumor-derived (circulating) molecules in cancer. Using liquid biopsy, she investigates circulating nucleic acids (i.e. ctDNA and CTCs) and tumour-derived extracellular vesicles (EVs) in mediating tumour progression and treatment resistance. Her research program is divided in two main themes: 1) design clinically feasible approaches to detect cancer development and monitor treatment response/resistance through changes in ctDNA (biomarker discovery); 2) investigate how circulating biomarkers contribute to tumour progression and can be used as nanomedicine delivery vehicles (therapeutics). Dr. Burnier is a Fonds de Recherche en Santé Research Scholar, recipient of the Canadian Cancer Society Emerging Scholar Award (2021-2026), and a William Dawson Award recipient (2023-2028).

Dr. Arielle Elkrief MD, FRCPC is a clinician-scientist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Oncology at the Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal (CHUM). She was recruited to the CRCHUM in 2023 and directs her research laboratory focused on the gut and tumor microbiome as a biomarker of response to immunotherapy. She is also co-Director of the CHUM Microbiome Centre where she leads microbiome-centered clinical trials combining microbiome interventions such as fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT), prebiotics, and diet. In addition, she contributed to establishing the negative impact of antibiotics on immunotherapy activity in patients with cancer. She was recently awarded the American Society of Clinical Oncology Young Investigator Award and the Society of Immunotherapy of Cancer-Melanoma Research Alliance Women in Melanoma Award.

Matthew Frigault, MD (MGH) is the John and Ashley Ranelli Endowed Scholar in Cancer Innovation and Associate Professor of Medicine at HMS. He is a cellular therapist and bone marrow transplant physician scientist who has extensive preclinical, clinical, and translational research experience involving the use of immune effector cell therapy for hematologic and solid tumor malignancies. His work has focused on high-risk patient populations, rare tumor subtypes and immunomodulatory approaches for toxicity mitigation and augmentation of T cell function. He is also the Clinical Director of the Cellular Immunotherapy Program and oversees the clinical research infrastructure for cell and gene therapy

Dr. Hani Goodarzi is an Arc Core Investigator and Associate Professor at UCSF. His research combines novel discovery platforms and frontier AI models to reveal molecular mechanisms of cancer progression. Dr. Goodarzi has made key scientific contributions at the intersection of AI, RNA biology, and cancer research, and in both diagnostics and therapeutics. His work has been recognized with prestigious awards, including the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise and the AACR-MPM Transformative Cancer Research Award. Dr. Goodarzi was previously honoured with the Martin and Rose Wachtel Award in Cancer Research and named an American Cancer Society scholar.

Co-Founder of the MAQC (Massive Analysis and Quality Control) Society, Member of the Scientific Advisory Board of: Consortium de recherche biopharmaceutique (CQDM), Quebec, Canada, Break Through Cancer, Commonwealth Cancer Consortium, United States Canadian Institute of Health Research – Institute of Genetics, Canada, Cancer Grand Challenges, United Kingdom Shriners Children, United States Member of the Board of Directors of AACR International – Canada, The American Association for Cancer Research, United States Head of Data Science for the Structural Genomics Consortium

Daniel Khalaf is a Medical Oncologist at Odette Cancer Centre in Toronto, Associate Scientist at the Sunnybrook Research Institute and Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. He completed a fellowship in Genitourinary Medical Oncology in Vancouver with a focus on prostate cancer research, including biomarker discovery and validation, and patient reported outcomes in clinical trials. His research at Sunnybrook has continued on these themes, with a focus on correlative biomarkers of toxicity and treatment benefit in metastatic prostate cancer. He is very active in phase 1 to 3 trials at Odette Cancer Centre.

Ramon grew up in the east of the Netherlands where he got his Bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Sciences. He moved to Memphis, TN, USA where he worked on his PhD project in genetics and molecular biology at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. After his PhD he moved to the Max Planck in Freiburg, Germany to work with Dr Erika Pearce, a world leader in immunometabolism to study effects of metabolic pathway changes on the anti-tumour function of T cells. In July 2019 he was recruited to UBC and BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute in Vancouver to start his own program in immunometabolism and continues to work on the puzzle of how metabolic pathways control immune cell differentiation and function in health and disease. He has received a Canadian Cancer Society Early Scholar Award, and a Michael Smith for Health Research BC Scholar Award. Outside of work he likes to spend time in the remote areas of BC and beyond looking for animals to photograph.

Marco is a UBC Killam Professor in Medical Genetics and the Michael Smith Laboratories. Co-founder and Director of Canada’s Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre for more than two decades, Marco is known for his work in genomics and precision cancer medicine.

Marco co-led numerous studies revealing new mutations, biomarkers, and therapeutic targets in cancers. In 2003, he led the DNA sequencing of the agent causing SARS, revealing it to be a coronavirus and demonstrating that sequencing was feasible as part of a rapid response to an emerging infectious disease. Marco now co-leads the first program to use whole genome and transcriptome sequencing to personalize cancer medicine and works with the Terry Fox Research Institute to share experience, data and insights across Canada through the Marathon of Hope Cancer Centres Network.

Marco’s recognitions include: National Killam Prize in Health Sciences, Officer of the Order of Canada, Order of British Columbia, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Canadian Medical Hall of Fame, the Chew Wei Memorial Prize in Cancer Research, Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, the Terry Fox Medal and the Don Rix Lifetime Achievement Award. His contributions to genomics were recognized with honorary degrees from Simon Fraser University and the University of Calgary.

Dr. Kathy McCoy is a Professor in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Cumming School of Medicine, member of the Snyder Institute, Scientific Director of the International Microbiome Center, and holds the Killam Memorial Chair at the University of Calgary, Canada. Her research group uses germ-free and gnotobiotic models to investigate the cellular and molecular mechanisms by which the microbiome regulates host immunity and physiology. She is particularly interested in the dynamic interplay between the gut microbiota and the innate and adaptive immune systems. Her research aims to understand how exposure to intestinal microbes, particularly during early life, educates and regulates the mucosal, systemic and neuronal immune systems and how this can affect susceptibility to diseases, such as allergy, autoimmunity, and neurodevelopmental disorders. Her lab also investigates how the microbiome regulates the immune system throughout life with the aim to identify microbial therapies that can be employed to enhance current therapeutic approaches, such as in cancer.

Dr. Mahoney is a translational scientist at Cumming School of Medicine in the University of Calgary with 25 years of experience studying human health and disease. Over the past 15 years, his research has made important contributions to the development of numerous cancer immunotherapies that have been translated into human clinical trials. Currently his lab is focused on developing cell, virus and microbiome-inspired therapeutics to treat various forms of cancer in children, adolescents, and adults. Dr. Mahoney is the founder and Director of the Riddell Centre for Cancer Immunotherapy, which seeks to develop innovative next generation cell and immune therapies for cancer and deliver them to patients in Alberta and beyond. Outside the lab, Doug spends his time with his wife and three children, mostly enjoying the Alberta/BC wilderness.

Dr. Pamela Ohashi is an internationally recognized leader in immunology and tumor immunity. She received her Ph.D. in Immunology from the University of Toronto in 1988 under Dr. Tak Mak and completed her postdoctoral training at the University of Zurich with Nobel Laureate Dr. Rolf Zinkernagel and Dr. Hans Hengartner, deepening her expertise in T cell biology and immune regulation.
In 1992, she established her own laboratory at UHN’s Princess Margaret (PM) Cancer Centre in Toronto, where she has built an internationally recognized research program investigating T cell activation and function. Her lab investigates the tumor immune microenvironment to better understand and improve anti-tumor immune responses, with the goal of translating fundamental discoveries into effective cancer immunotherapies.
Since 2005, Dr. Ohashi has led the Tumor Immunotherapy Program (TIP) at the PM Cancer Centre, growing it into a comprehensive translational research network. The program integrates advanced cell therapies, state-of-the-art immune profiling, and clinical trials to support the development of novel immune-based treatments.
In 2024, she became the founding Director and Chair of the Centre for Immunology to Immunotherapy (Ci2i) at UHN. Ci2i builds on the foundation of TIP and broadens its scope to include autoimmunity, transplant medicine, and infectious disease. Its mission is to unite clinicians and scientists at UHN to advance immune-based therapies across a range of diseases.
Dr. Ohashi has also shaped the field through leadership roles with the AACR and SITC, and as co-founder of the Canadian Cancer Immunotherapy Consortium, fostering collaboration and innovation in cancer immunotherapy.

Dr. Alexandre Pellan Cheng (PhD) leads a multidisciplinary liquid biopsy research program that bridges fundamental assay development with translational clinical application. His work focuses on improving cancer detection and treatment monitoring through highly sensitive circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) analysis. At the discovery level, his group develops novel whole-genome sequencing assays that capture rare tumor-derived mutations in blood. These assays are embedded in investigator-initiated clinical trials to assess their utility in real-world cancer care. His team’s translational efforts aim to implement ctDNA technologies in clinical settings for malignancies where sensitive tools for early detection, treatment response monitoring, and biomarker-guided therapeutic decision-making remain limited.

Hoifung Poon is General Manager at Health Futures in Microsoft Research and an affiliated faculty at the University of Washington Medical School. He leads biomedical AI research and incubation, with the overarching goal of structuring medical data to optimize delivery and accelerate discovery for precision health. His team and collaborators are among the first to explore large language models (LLMs) and multimodal generative AI in health applications, producing popular open-source foundation models such as PubMedBERT, BioGPT, BiomedCLIP, LLaVA-Med, BiomedParse, with tens of millions of downloads. His latest publication in Nature features GigaPath, the first whole-slide digital pathology foundation model pretrained on over one billion pathology image tiles. He has led successful research partnerships with large health providers and life science companies, creating AI systems in daily use for applications such as molecular tumor board and clinical trial matching. His prior work has been recognized with Best Paper Awards from premier AI venues such as NAACL, EMNLP, and UAI, and he was named the “Technology Champion” by the Puget Sound Business Journal in the 2024 Health Care Leadership Awards. He received his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington, specializing in machine learning and NLP.

Dr. Pedram Razavi is a medical oncologist and physician-scientist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), specializing in precision oncology for breast cancer. He serves as Director of the Breast Cancer Translational Program and Molecular Tumor Board, and Director of Liquid Biopsy and Cancer Genomics for the MSK Biomarker Development Program. His research focuses on integrative clinicogenomic approaches and circulating tumor biomarkers to characterize breast cancer at both systemic and molecular levels and to expand the clinical utility of liquid biopsy technologies.

Dr. Razavi earned his MD from Tehran University of Medical Sciences and his MPH and PhD in cancer epidemiology from the University of Southern California. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Channing Laboratory, an internal medicine residency at USC, and a medical oncology fellowship at MSK, where he also conducted postdoctoral research in cancer genomics in the lab of Dr. José Baselga.

During my residency in internal medicine (2011-2016), I became intrigued with basic and translational microbiome sciences. With support from my former supervisor Prof. R. Schmid (Director, Depart. Internal Medicine II, Techn. Univ. Munich – a leading center in gastroenterology in Germany), I established an independent research group investigating the role of the gut microbiome in colitis and functional GI disorders. At the end of my physician – scientist, medical residency, I joined the lab of Prof. M. van den Brink at MSKCC, New York, co-mentored by Prof. E. Pamer, to investigate the role of the gut microbiome in T cell driven immunooncology, an intriguing field in medicine with tremendous hope and future (2016-2019). After three years of a highly successful postdoc with an enormous expansion of my microbiome research skills including gnotobiotic and bioinformatic work, I was recruited in 2019 to the DKFZ as independent research group leader within the research division Microbiome and Cancer headed by Prof. E. Elinav. Through Eran’s mentoring, microbiome research skills were brought to excellence, especially in the field of translational microbiome research. In 2022, I was appointed Professor for Infectious Diseases and Translational Microbiome Research to the University Hospital Tübingen, and continue my research on the gut microbiome, cancer development and immunotherapy and infections in immunocompromised hosts.

Dr. Alex Wyatt is an associate professor in Urologic Sciences at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is a senior research scientist at the Vancouver Prostate Centre and a senior scientist at BC Cancer. His research goals are to identify associations between genomic alterations and patient outcomes in metastatic prostate and bladder cancer, and to translate these findings into clinical biomarkers. Dr. Wyatt has developed novel laboratory and computational techniques to study plasma circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA).

Dr. Eric Stutheit-Zhao is final-year resident in radiation oncology, and is targeting a career as a clinician-scientist, with an expertise in leveraging large scale pan-omics data, including liquid biopsy data, to personalize cancer treatment and design clinical trials. He completed his MD/PhD in Bioinformatics at the University of British Columbia with Dr. Steven Jones under the Personalized Oncogenomics program. He then completed postdoctoral studies at the Princess Margaret with Dr. Trevor Pugh and Dr. Scott Bratman, as well as at the DKFZ German Cancer Centre with Dr. Stefan Pfister. He has published over 30 peer-reviewed papers, including first-author work in Cancer Discovery, Nature Genetics, and Science Advances, and is a recipient of the CRI Irvington Postdoctoral Fellowship and ASCO Young Investigator Award.