Special Guest Session

Saturday, May 16, 8:00 – 8:30 AM

About Mary Woolley, President and CEO, Research!America

Mary Woolley is the president and CEO of Research!America, an alliance that advocates for science, discovery, and innovation to achieve better health for all. Woolley is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and served two terms on its Governing Council. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has served on the National Academy of Sciences Board on Higher Education and the Workforce, and the Board on Life Sciences. She is a Founding Member of the Board of Associates of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and served as a member of the University of Chicago Medical Center’s Division of the Biological Sciences and the Pritzker School of Medicine Council. She is co-chair of the Science and Technology Action Committee. Woolley holds honorary doctoral degrees from Wayne State University and the Northeast Ohio Medical University. Woolley has also served as president of the Association of Independent Research Institutes, as a reviewer for the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, and as a consultant to several research organizations. She has a 35-year publication history on science advocacy and research related topics, and is a sought-after speaker, often interviewed by science, news, and policy journalists

State-of-the-Art Plenary Lecture 3

Friday, May 15, 2:45 – 3:15 PM



About Hunter Shain, PhD

Dr. Hunter Shain is an Associate Professor in the Department of Dermatology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where he is also affiliated with the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Institute of Human Genetics. His research program harnesses cutting-edge genomic and single-cell technologies to investigate how mutations accumulate in human skin cells and fuel the earliest steps of cancer development.

Shain earned his B.S. in Biochemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, graduating summa cum laude, before completing his Ph.D. in Cancer Biology at Stanford University. He then pursued postdoctoral training at UCSF, where he began his focus on the genetics and evolution of melanoma. His laboratory now integrates single-cell DNA sequencing, single-cell RNA sequencing, and spatial transcriptomics to create high-resolution maps of skin biology and tumorigenesis.

A leader in cancer genomics, Shain has made influential contributions to understanding melanoma evolution, cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma, and the mutational processes shaping normal skin. His group reported the first single-cell atlas of mutations in human melanocytes and has shown how normal skin cells can harbor oncogenic mutations long before cancer arises. Currently, he serves as a lead investigator in the NIH Human Tumor Atlas Network, directing the effort to build a “pre-cancer atlas of skin cancer.”

Shain’s research has been published in leading journals including Nature, Science, Nature Genetics, The New England Journal of Medicine, Cancer Cell, and Nature Reviews Cancer. His work has been widely profiled in scientific and medical media, underscoring its impact on both fundamental biology and translational cancer research. He has been recognized with numerous awards, including the LEO Foundation Award, the Society of Melanoma Research Young Investigator Award, and selection as one of the American Association for Cancer Research’s Next Generation Stars.

Herman Beerman Lecture: Nuclear Receptors at the Crossroads of Metabolism, Physiology, and Disease

Friday, May 15, 2:15 – 2:45 PM



About Ron Evans, PhD

Ronald M. Evans is a Professor and Director of the Gene Expression Laboratory and holds the March of Dimes Chair in Molecular and Development Biology.  He is best known for his discovery of the nuclear receptor superfamily. He is a Fellow of the American Association for Cancer Research, American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is routinely listed in the Top 100 Scientists in the World and is a Highly Cited Researcher, with over 246,000 citations. Awards include the Gairdner, Lasker, Wolf and Japan Prizes.

About the Herman Beerman Lecture

This award is given in recognition of Dr. Herman Beerman’s long and devoted service to the SID and his efforts to secure for it a position of respect in the scientific community.  The Beerman Lecture is given by a distinguished medical scholar at a scientific session of the Society’s Annual Meeting.  Traditionally, lecturers from fields other than dermatology are chosen in order to give meeting attendees the opportunity to learn about scientific advances in other fields.

Eugene Farber Lecture: Rare variants drive discovery in Psoriasis: From genetic mechanisms to novel therapies

Anne Bowcock, PhD

Friday, May 15, 11:30 – 12:00 PM

Anne Bowcock, PhD is the Norman Orentreich, MD Professor of Dermatology Research and Professor of Oncological Sciences and Genetics & Genome Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine in New York, USA. She obtained her PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg, South Africa) and performed postdoctoral studies at Stanford University. She has held faculty positions at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, Washington University in Saint Louis and at Imperial College (London, UK) before moving to New York in 2017. Her research interests are understanding the genetic basis of psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis and the genetic basis of rare cancers such as acral and uveal melanoma. She has been a pioneer in the genetic and genomic analyses of psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis, which she has studied for over 30 years, with the long-term goal of identifying novel ways of combatting their effects. Together with Dr. Allen Menter she founded the National Psoriasis Tissue Bank in 1993. Her group was one of the first to perform global genomic analyses of psoriatic skin, examining the altered global transcriptome (long and short RNAs) and the psoriasis epigenome. She performed some of the first psoriasis GWAS and has pioneered the study of rare predisposing variants in psoriasis. Her laboratory identified CARD14 as a gene mutated in rare Mendelian forms of psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis. This has provided important insights into both adult and pediatric forms of the disease. She has continued to examine the altered CARD14 signalsome and novel ways of combatting its effects, including targeted protein degradation with PROTAC. She has over 255 publications with over 36,000 citations and is co-inventor on two patents. She is active in the human genetics community, has served on the Board of Directors of the American Society of Human Genetics and is currently an Executive Board Member of the Human Genome Organization (HUGO). She was the recipient of a Psoriasis Research Achievement Award from the American Skin Association in 2005 and has been an International Psoriasis Councilor (IPC) since 2016.

About the Eugene Farber Lecture

The Eugene M. Farber endowment was established by his family in memory of Dr. Farber’s scientific career and devotion to understanding the pathogenesis of psoriasis.  In 2007, the SID Board of Directors voted to create the Eugene M. Farber endowed lecture.  It is typically presented at the SID’s Annual Meeting (and Virtual ones) by an investigator whose work is relevant to expanding insights into the pathophysiology and treatment of psoriasis.

State-of-the-Art Plenary Lecture 2: Immune–Endocrine Regulation of Skin Microbiome Homeostasis

Thursday, May 14, 2:45 – 3:15 PM

About Tamia Harris-Tryon, MD/PhD

Tamia Harris-Tryon, MD, PhD is Vice Chair of Basic Research in the Department of Dermatology at UT Southwestern Medical Center, where she holds the Thomas L. Shields Professorship. Her laboratory investigates the skin microbiome, focusing on how resident microbes shape the skin barrier and contribute to the pathogenesis of inflammatory skin diseases. A central aim of her group is translating these fundamental discoveries into new therapeutic approaches for patients.

Dr. Harris-Tryon received her MD and PhD from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where she also completed her dermatology residency at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. Board-certified by the American Board of Dermatology, she joined the UT Southwestern faculty in 2014 and pursued additional research training in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute laboratory of Dr. Lora Hooper.

She has published in Cell Host & Microbe, Science, eLife, and PNAS, advancing understanding of immune–microbiome–skin interactions, and has authored influential reviews in Science, JAAD, and Mucosal Immunology. Her honors include the American Academy of Dermatology Young Investigator Award (2017). In 2024, she was elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI), where she now serves on the council.

Her research program is supported by the NIH (R01), the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, and the Leo Foundation. She lives in Dallas with her husband, Ahren Tryon, and their two children.

Naomi Kanof Lecture: My adventures in dermato-epidemiology.

David J. Margolis, MD/PhD

Thursday, May 14, 2:15 – 2:45 PM

David J. Margolis, MD MSCE PhD, is currently Gerald S. Lazarus Professor of Dermatology, and a Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is board certified in dermatology and internal medicine. He is the current Vice Chair of Faculty for the Department of Dermatology. He is the co-founder and Associate Director of the Center for Clinical Science in Dermatology, in the Department of Dermatology of the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Margolis has had an active research program mostly investigating topics in skin diseases using epidemiologic and biostatistical approaches including large medical databases and longitudinal registries that have included the collection of biomarkers, microbiome, and DNA. Dr. Margolis’ research awards have focused on the diagnosis, treatment, and genetics of atopic dermatitis, cardiovascular disease and psoriasis, antibiotic over use, and the effect of chronic antibiotic exposure in patients with acne. These studies have used both epidemiologic and clinical trial methods was well as the incorporation of basic science techniques and technologies. He was the chair of the Perelman School of Medicine promotion committee for nearly a decade. More than 15 of his prior clinical research mentees, who received Master’s in Clinical Epidemiology degrees (MSCE), now hold academic faculty appointments.

About the Naomi M. Kanof Lecture

Established in 1988, this award was established to honor the memory of Naomi Kanof, MD.  The Naomi M. Kanof Lectureship honors an individual making significant contributions to the improvement of health through clinical research.  Clinical research is broadly defined as any scientific endeavor with a direct application to improving the prevention, diagnosis, or treatment of clinical disease.  This investigative work can be based in the laboratory and should be implemented or just ready to be implemented in clinical practice.

State-of-the-Art Plenary Lecture 1: Uncovering mechanisms of hair follicle dermal niche formation in development and regeneration

Thursday, May 14, 12:00 – 12:30

About Peggy Myung, PhD

Peggy Myung, M.D., Ph.D. is Associate Professor and Vice Chair of Research in the Department of Dermatology at Yale University. Her research has been focused on elucidating the molecular and cellular mechanisms that regulate hair follicle dermal niche formation during skin development and regeneration. Her lab combines single-cell genomic data with in vivo and in vitro models to map the molecular drivers that regulate hair follicle dermal niche populations as well as other dermal lineages. A major goal of her lab is to recapitulate programs of dermal development to induce new hair follicle growth in adult skin as well as to help build skin equivalent models that faithfully represent normal skin for therapeutic testing and disease modeling.

William Montagna Lecture: Translational Concepts from Melanoma Therapeutic Resistance Mechanisms

About Roger Lo, MD/PhD

Thursday, May 14, 11:30 AM – 12:00 PM

Dr. Roger Lo is Professor of the Departments of Medicine and Molecular & Medical Pharmacology, Associate Chief of Dermatology, and Director of the Dermatology STAR Residency at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine. He earned his BS in Biology (Honors and Distinction, 1994, Stanford University) and his MD-PhD degrees from the Tri-institutional (Weill Cornell, Memorial Sloan-Kettering, and Rockefeller) Program in 2002. After residency and postdoc training at UCLA, he joined the UCLA faculty in 2008, received tenure (UC Full Time Equivalent) in 2014, and rose to full professor in 2016. In 2013, the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) recognized Dr. Lo with the 33rd Annual Award for Outstanding Achievement in Cancer Research for providing the major scientific rationale toward the use of BRAF and MEK inhibitors in combination to effectively treat melanoma – a therapeutic approach that is now globally considered the standard of care for melanoma and approved by the US FDA for cancer-agnostic indication. Studies from his group have led to multiple clinical trials and ten patents. His group has been credited with the first studies on the roles of tumor heterogeneity, genomic instability, and immune microenvironment in determining clinical responses to current melanoma therapies. His primary research articles have been published in Nature, Nature Medicine, New England Journal of Medicine, Cancer Discovery, Cancer Cell, Cell, and Immunity. In 2017, AACR recognized Dr. Lo’s translational melanoma research with the inaugural AACR-Waun Ki Hong Award for Outstanding Achievement in Cancer Research. The American Society for Clinical Investigation inducted Dr. Lo in 2012 and the Association of American Physicians in 2024. ClarivateAnalytics (formerly Thomson Reuters) named Dr. Lo a Highly Cited Researcher (HCR). He served on the Editorial Board of Cancer Discovery and chaired the Education Program of the 2021 AACR Annual Meeting. Currently, Dr. Lo serves as the Vice Chair of the Melanoma Committee in the Southwest Oncology Group (SWOG) and on the Scientific Committee of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO).

About the William Montagna Lecture

The William Montagna Lecture is given annually at the SID’s Annual Meeting.  The award is intended to honor and reward young investigators with primary emphasis given to researchers in skin biology.

Igniting the flame—How DNA triggers immune and inflammatory responses

James Chen, PhD

Wednesday, May 13, 5:30 – 6:00 PM

About the Speaker

Zhijian ‘James’ Chen is an Investigator of Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. He is also Director of Inflammation Research Center and George L. MacGregor Distinguished Chair in Biomedical Science at UT Southwestern. Prior to moving to Dallas, Chen was a senior scientist at ProScript Inc. where he helped discover the proteasome inhibitor VELCADE, a medicine used for the treatment of multiple myeloma.

After joining UT Southwestern in 1997, Chen discovered the regulatory role of ubiquitination in protein kinase activation in the NF-kB and MAP kinase pathways. In addition, he discovered the Mitochondrial Antiviral Signaling (MAVS) protein that reveals a new role of mitochondria in immunity. In 2012, Chen discovered cyclic GMP-AMP synthase (cGAS) as a cytosolic DNA sensor and a new cyclic di-nucleotide signaling pathway that mediate innate immune responses in animal cells. For his work, Chen has received numerous honors including the National Academy of Science Award in Molecular Biology (2012), American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) Merck Award (2015), Lurie Prize in Biomedical Sciences from the Foundation of NIH (2018), Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2019), Switzer Prize (2019), William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Basic and Tumor Immunology (2020), Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize (2023), Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research (2024), Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize (2025) and Elaine Redding Brinster Prize (2026).

Chen is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine, and a Fellow of Royal Society.

About the Julius Stone Lecture

The Julius Stone Lectureship is intended to promote the advancement of knowledge in immunology as its relates to the skin and skin disease. The Lectureship is also intended to honor Dr. Julius Stone, whose great commitment to the application of new principles of immunology to the benefit of patients with skin disorders is recognized by this award.

Stephen Rothman Award Presentation

Friday, May 15 at 12:00 – 12:15 P.M.

The Stephen Rothman Memorial Award is presented annually for distinguished service to investigative cutaneous medicine.  The recipient of this award has made major scientific achievements and excelled as a teacher and recruiter of outstanding dermatologists.  The recipient is also an individual who has distinctly altered the course and image of dermatology or its allied fields.  It is the Society’s highest award.

This year’s awardee is Thomas S Kupper, MD

Chair Emeritus, Department of Dermatology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital Chair, Department of Dermatology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Thomas B. Fitzpatrick Professor, Harvard Medical School

Dr. Kupper was the founding Chair of the Department of Dermatology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where he led the department for more than 25 years. He is chair at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, and the Thomas B Fitzpatrick Professor of Dermatology at Harvard Medical School. He is the founder of the Cutaneous Oncology Disease Center and leads the Cutaneous Lymphoma Program at the Dana-Farber Cancer Center. Dr. Kupper is an internationally known expert in the treatment and care of Cutaneous Lymphomas. He is also a respected teacher and mentor, and many of his trainees have gone on to become Department Chairs, Chiefs, or academic faculty around the country and the world.

Dr. Kupper’s research has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health for 35 years and is focused on:

1.  T cell vaccine biology,
2. T cell immunobiology, including T cell subsets resident to tissue (TRM), and
3. Cancer immunobiology including immunotherapy.

His current work is supported by the National Institutes for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the National Institute for Arthritis, Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases and the National Institute for Cancer. He has previously been funded by a MERIT award from the NIAID, the first Specialized Program in Research Excellence (SPORE) in Skin Cancer (NCI), and a Transformative Research Award from the NIH Office of the Director.

He has served on multiple NIH study sections from 1991 to present. He has received numerous awards, including the SID William Montagna Award and Kligman-Frost Leadership Award, the JSID Tanioku Kihei Award, the ESDR Rene Touraine Award, the AAD Marion Sulzberger Award, and is an honorary member of the Korean, Japanese, Swiss, and Austrian Societies for Investigative Dermatology.

He has been elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the American Dermatologic Association, the American Association of Physicians, and is a Fellow of the American Association of Arts and Sciences.