Elsa R. Flores

At Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida, Elsa R. Flores, Ph.D., serves as a Senior Member in the Department of Molecular Oncology, holding secondary appointments in the Departments of Cutaneous Oncology and Thoracic Oncology. Her academic responsibilities extend to the University of South Florida (USF) Health Morsani College of Medicine, where she is a professor in both the Department of Oncologic Sciences and the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Much of Dr. Flores' recent work has combined research leadership with institutional administration. After joining Moffitt in 2016 as Chair and Senior Member of the Department of Molecular Oncology, a position she kept until 2022, she was named Associate Center Director and Division Chief of Discovery Science in 2022 and continued in that role through 2026. The appointment gave her oversight of six academic departments, namely Drug Discovery, Immunology, Metabolism and Physiology, Molecular Oncology, Tumor Microenvironment and Metastasis, and Bioengineering, a group that together numbered 59 faculty members. She played a key part in founding Moffitt's Department of Bioengineering in 2022 and took on the role of Executive Project Sponsor for the research programming, design, and construction of the Moffitt Discovery and Innovation Center at Speros. Her arrival at Moffitt also brought a tenured professorship at USF and leadership of the Cancer Biology and Evolution Program under the center's NCI Cancer Center Support Grant. The scientific questions behind this leadership have remained consistent for more than twenty years. Dr. Flores has devoted her research to the p53 family of tumor suppressor genes, examining in particular how p63 and p73 shape cancer development, metastasis, and treatment resistance. Her studies have clarified how these genes regulate stem cell maintenance, metabolism, and tumor progression, and the results have been published in some of the most prominent journals in the field. Her preparation for this career began at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she earned a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering in 1994. She then completed a Ph.D. in Cancer Biology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1999, carrying out her doctoral research at the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research, and she afterward held a postdoctoral fellowship in Cancer Biology at MIT. Dr. Flores launched her independent research program at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, where she was appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Oncology in 2004. She earned tenure as an Associate Professor in 2010 and rose to full Professor with tenure in 2015. Her institutional service there included appointments as Co-Director and later Director of the Genes and Development Graduate Ph.D. Program, along with a co-leadership position in the Metastasis Research Program funded through MD Anderson's NCI Cancer Center Support Grant.