Paul Nghiem
Paul T. Nghiem
George F. Odland Professor & Head, UW Dermatology
Pathology & Oral Health Sciences (Adjunct)
Affiliate Investigator, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
Dr. Paul Nghiem (pronounced NEE-em) is Head, Division of Dermatology, Department of Medicine and the George F. Odland Professor, Department of Medicine/Dermatology. He is also Adjunct Professor in the Departments of Oral Health Sciences and Pathology and an Affiliate Investigator in the Clinical Research Division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
After college, he pursued MD and PhD degrees at Stanford University where he studied Cancer Biology and Immunology, with a special interest in T cell activation.
After his medical and graduate studies, he completed: A medicine internship at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Dermatology residency at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, A Howard Hughes Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Cancer Biology with Stuart Schreiber in the Harvard Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. During this time he studied a protein called ATR that is important in a cell's response to UV damage. ATR is interesting because cancerous and pre-cancerous skin cells need it much more than normal cells; ATR can be inhibited by caffeine; and several large epidemiologic studies link caffeine consumption to decreased skin cancer.
In 2003, he started his own lab at the Cutaneous Biology Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
in 2006, he leads a multi-disciplinary team that cares for patients with complex skin cancers and follows a cohort of over 1000 patients with Merkel cell carcinoma. Another focus in his lab is on how cells respond to UV damage (and how caffeine can protect against skin cancer, possibly when used topically).
In April, 2015, he became Head of Dermatology in the Department of Medicine at the University of Washington.
He has published over 80 papers that in aggregate have been cited over 2900 times.
He currently has 5 grant awards from the NIH, including a K24 grant for mentoring young physicians and scientists.
