When Liza Makowski, PhD, moved to Memphis to join the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, she amplified her goal of making a difference in the cancer space.
Dr. Makowski leads the Makowski Lab at UT Health Science Center, with a goal to study how obesity and immune cells like white blood cells affect cancer risk and cancer outcomes. “I’ve always been interested in obesity and how weight gain or weight loss changes the immune system which can affect how we get cancer, how we treat cancer, and how we prevent cancer from coming back,” she said. Since 2020, she has received more than $12.6 million in grant funding as either a principal investigator, a multiple principal investigator, or a mentor for her trainees at UT Health Science Center.
Dr. Makowski is a professor in the College of Medicine’s Division of Hematology-Oncology and has joint appointments in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Biochemistry and the College of Pharmacy’s Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences. She also serves as an associate director for Education and Development for UT Health Science Center’s Center for Cancer Research, which is directed by her husband, Neil Hayes, MD, MPH, chief of Hematology and Oncology in the College of Medicine.
The couple moved to Memphis with their three children in 2017 and have dedicated the past seven years to increasing UT Health Science Center’s status as a cancer research institution to benefit the state of Tennessee and the Mid-South region. Dr. Makowski has a dream to help develop UT Health Science Center into a world-class adult cancer center with a widespread impact on patients’ lives. However, if someone had told her at the beginning of her career this would be her goal one day, she might not have believed them.
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