Elisa Woodhouse's Biography

Elisa Woodhouse, Program Director, Tumor Biology and Microenvironment Branch, NIH/NCI

Dr. Elisa Woodhouse joined the Division of Cancer Biology, NCI in 2008. She is a developmental and cancer biologist and serves as a Program Director in the Tumor Biology and Microenvironment Branch (TBMB) where she manages a grant portfolio related to the various facets of tumor-microenvironment ecosystem dynamics in co-organizing and regulating early lesion indolence or aggressiveness, tumor progression and response to therapy. Areas of particular programmatic interests include extracellular matrix reprograming and mechano-signaling, extracellular vesicle-mediated communication, and heterogeneous stromal cell types-tumor interplay at different stages of tumorigenesis. Dr. Woodhouse co-leads the early lesion risk stratification and precision prevention-focused Molecular and Cellular Characterization of Screen-Detected Lesions (MCL Consortium) and co-developed the emerging Translational and Basic Sciences Research in Early Lesions (TBEL) initiative that aims to understand the biological and pathophysiological mechanisms across the lesion and its microenvironment driving or restraining pre-cancers and early cancers, in an effort to facilitate/inform biology-backed precision prevention approaches.

Dr. Woodhouse received her Ph.D in Developmental Biology from the Johns Hopkins University. Her graduate training was in the laboratory of Dr. Allen Shearn with studies on Drosophila mutations that lead to imaginal disc and brain tumors. As a post-doctoral fellow and later a Staff Scientist in the laboratories of Dr. Lance Liotta and Dr. Kathleen Kelly at the NCI, she built upon and continued genetic studies using the Drosophila model while also expanding the scope of her work to human cancer studies related to migration, invasion, and metastasis.