Our 2018 Honoree Dr. Ramon Parsons, is the Director of The Tisch Cancer Institute at Mount Sinai. Ramon Parsons grew up in Washington, D.C. After earning his MD and PhD degrees from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, he was a postdoctoral fellow with Bert Vogelstein at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he and his colleagues discovered that inactivation of DNA mismatch repair genes causes hereditary colorectal cancer. At Columbia University Medical Center, as Avon Professor of Pathology and Medicine and Leader of the Breast Cancer Program of the Herbert Irving Cancer Center, his research laboratory identified the PTEN tumor suppressor gene, which he showed is inactivated in a wide variety of cancers and cancer predisposition syndromes. Dr. Parsons has been a leader in establishing the importance of PTEN and the PI3K pathway for cancer using a combination of genetic, biochemical, human tissue, metabolic, and systems biology approaches, and has been awarded significant grant funding in support of his internationally-recognized research. In 2013, Dr. Parsons joined the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai as Ward-Coleman Professor in Cancer Research, Chairman of the Department of Oncological Sciences, and co-Leader of the Cancer Mechanisms Program of The Tisch Cancer Institute (TCI) at Mount Sinai. In 2017, he was appointed Director of TCI and Director of Mount Sinai Cancer for the Mount Sinai Health System. Dr. Parsons is a recipient of the 2011 American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Outstanding Investigator Award for Breast Cancer Research and served as Chair of the Special Conferences Committee at the AACR from 2011 to 2017 where he established an annual meeting dedicated to ovarian cancer research. He was inducted into the Johns Hopkins University Society of Scholars in 2015 and elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2017. Also in 2017, Dr. Parsons received an Outstanding Investigator Award from the National Cancer Institute.