J. Randolph Hecht, MD is a Professor of Clinical Medicine in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA School of Medicine. He holds the Carol and Saul Rosenzweig Chair for Cancer Therapies Development and is the Director of the UCLA Gastrointestinal Oncology Program. Dr. Hecht graduated from Eastern Virginia Medical School and took his internal medicine residency at Northwestern and completed fellowships in gastroenterology research at the University of Chicago, and in gastroenterology and medical oncology at UCLA. He is the director of the UCLA GI Oncology Program which has one of the largest clinical and research programs in the Western United States.

Dr. Hecht is an internationally known clinical and translational researcher who has published widely in the field of gastrointestinal cancers. He has run multiple phase II and phase III trials with targeted therapies and immunotherapy. Dr. Hecht is currently leading national and international multicenter trials with novel immune and CAR-T therapies.

Dr. Strickler is an Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Medical Oncology at Duke University. His clinic focuses on the treatment of gastrointestinal malignancies, with a particular emphasis on gastroesophageal, pancreatic, and colorectal cancers. As leader of the Duke Cancer Institute Molecular Tumor Board, Dr. Strickler directs precision cancer medicine efforts. In addition, he is the Associate Director for Clinical Research — GI Oncology at Duke University. He has served as principal investigator for over 50 clinical trials and is a member of the American Society of Clinical Oncology Treatment Guidelines Committee for Advanced Colon Cancer.

His research focuses on the design and execution of first-in-human and investigator-initiated clinical trials. He has a particular interest in non-invasive testing to identify and treat genomic drivers of treatment resistance. Dr. Strickler has recently served as Co-Chair of the GI Steering Committee for the Academic and Community Cancer Research United (ACCRU) clinical trial consortium.

Dr. Strickler received his B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he was a Morehead Scholar, and his MD from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. He completed his residency in Internal Medicine at the University of Washington and fellowship in Hematology and Medical Oncology at Duke University.