Dr. Conejo-Garcia completed his medical degree at the University of Zaragoza, in Spain. After a residency in Clinical Chemistry, he completed his PhD in Molecular Medicine from the University of Alcala, also in Spain, in 1998. He completed post doctorate training in pancreatic cancer at the University of Bern, Switzerland, the following year. He then moved to Germany to lead a project of the discovery and characterization of antimicrobial peptides. In 2001 he joined the ovarian cancer team at the University of Pennsylvania that identified for the first time the role of T cell responses in the outcome of ovarian cancer patients. He then joined the Department of Immunology at Dartmouth College, before moving back to the Penn Campus to lead the Tumor Microenvironment and Metastasis Program at The Wistar Institute. Dr. Conejo-Garcia joined Moffitt in November 2016.
Dr. Jose Conejo-Garcia is the Chair of the Department of Immunology at H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Research Institute. He is also co-leader of the Immunology Program at H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center.
Dr. Conejo-Garcia’s research program focuses on understanding and targeting mechanisms governing the balance between immunosuppression and protective immunity in the tumor microenvironment, with an emphasis on the role of cancer-driven pathological myelopoiesis.
By combining translational understanding and clinical specimens with mechanistic studies in mouse models, Dr. Conejo-Garcia has contributed to elucidate many of the mechanisms driving protective immunity against gynecologic cancers that have been unveiled in recent years, as demonstrated by >100 of recent articles that total >9,000 citations in Scopus. Those include manuscripts in The New England Journal of Medicine, Cell, Nature Medicine, Cancer Cell, Immunity and Cancer Discovery. He is the principal investigator of 3 active RO1s on the immunobiology of ovarian cancer, and collaborates with other investigators in other funded research projects. Dr. Conejo-Garcia serves as a reviewer on several editorial boards and has completed his tenure as a chartered member of the TTT NIH study section. He has been invited to present or chair sessions at over 30 national and international events including Paris, France; Guangzhou, China; Hannover, Germany; Valencia, Spain; Valdivia, Chile; and Mar del Plata, Argentina.
