Ellen Puré, Ph.D., the founding director of the Penn Vet Cancer Center, is the Grace Lansing Lambert Professor and former Chair of Biomedical Sciences at the School of Veterinary Medicine, and Professor of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Puré received her Baccalaureate degree from Washington University in St. Louis, and her doctorate from the University of Texas-Southwestern Medical School. She trained as a Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell Postdoctoral Fellow and Leukemia Society Special Fellow and then joined the Faculty at the Rockefeller University. In 1992, Dr. Puré moved to Philadelphia where she was on the Faculty of the Wistar Institute until moving to the University of Pennsylvania in 2013. Dr. Puré is an Associate Director of the Cancer Research Institute and currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Clinical Investigation and is a Founding Senior Editor of Cancer Immunology Research. Dr. Puré's research focuses on the cellular and molecular basis of inflammation and fibrosis. She studies basic mechanisms involved in these processes and the contribution of these processes to fibrotic diseases and cancer. Her laboratory has made seminal contributions to our understanding of the roles of stromal cells and extracellular matrix remodeling in tissue fibrosis and in cancer risk, initiation, progression, and metastasis. Her lab is developing novel therapeutic approaches to target stroma to treat fibrosis and cancer. In 2019, Dr. Puré was named a Fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Dr. Puré co-founded Capstan Therapeutics in 2021.