Elizabeth Repasky, PhD '81

Elizabeth Repasky, PhD ’81, is Distinguished Member, Professor of Oncology, the William Huebsch Professor of Immunology, and Leader of the Cell Stress and Biophysical Therapies Program at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center.

A leading expert in the fields of thermal medicine and tumor immunology, Dr. Repasky focuses her research on the tumor microenvironment and physiological changes in response to cancer with the goal of making new discoveries that could improve the efficacy of cancer therapies, including radiation, chemotherapy and immunotherapy. In recent years, her team has discovered new links between certain forms of thermal stress and other types of stressors on the anti-tumor immune system, information which has led to new Phase 1 and Phase 2 clinical trials at Roswell Park.

A native of western Pennsylvania, Dr. Repasky earned a bachelor of arts in biology from Seton Hill University and a PhD in Anatomical Sciences from the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology.

Dr. Repasky is the recipient of the 2015 J. Eugene Robinson Award and the 2018 William C Dewey Award for mentorship, both from the Society for Thermal Medicine. She has also been awarded Seton Hill University’s Distinguished Alumna Leadership Award, the Thomas B. Tomasi Hope Award for her research discoveries, as well as several mentorship and teaching awards, including the 2018 Graduate Student Association Award for Faculty Excellence in Mentoring and Teaching.

The author or co-author of 190 research publications, Dr. Repasky has been consistently funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and she is currently the principal investigator on four NIH grants. She also has obtained several patents associated with her work, served as thesis advisor to 23 PhD students, and trained 15 postdoctoral fellows.