Vivek Mittal

Vivek Mittal is an Associate Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery and the Director of the Neuberger Berman Lung Cancer Laboratory in the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, NY.  Prior to joining Weill Cornell Medical College, Dr. Mittal was an Assistant Professor at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, NY.  Dr. Mittal's major focus of research has been to address the contribution of the bone marrow-derived microenvironments in primary tumor growth, metastasis initiation and progression. His lab has demonstrated that bone marrow-derived progenitor cells contribute to the "angiogenic switch" in primary tumor growth and in the progression of micrometastases to life threatening macrometastases in the lung.  Dr. Mittal's lab also developed and utilized gene expression and RNAi technologies that can be used with bone marrow transplantation approaches to silence any gene in the BM compartment in vivo in mice.  Dr. Mittal is a PI on RCA, R01, and STARR Cancer Consortium grants and has served on several advisory and review boards. He lectures widely to diverse audiences throughout the world and has been published in leading journals including Science, Nature, Cancer Cell, PNAS, and other leading peer-reviewed journals and text books.  His research is supported by funds from the National Cancer Institute and private foundations, and several patents have emerged from his discoveries.  Dr. Mittal is a Co-PI in project 1 and will focus on the effects of vascular niche characteristics on bone marrow progenitor recruitment and signaling using tissue engineering and microfluidics.