Jeffrey Tyner was born in West Lafayette, Indiana. He attended undergraduate school at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, and graduate school at Washington University in St. Louis. His graduate work, focusing on asthma and respiratory viral infections, was conducted under the mentorship of Dr. Michael Holtzman. For his post-doctoral fellowship, Jeff joined Dr. Brian Druker’s laboratory at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) where he studied molecular mechanisms of leukemogenesis. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Cell, Developmental & Cancer Biology at the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute. Jeff’s research is focused towards: 1) identification of cancer-causing gene targets in cancer patients and 2) identification of patient-tailored, gene-targeted therapies. To accomplish these objectives, Jeff has spent the past 12 years developing and implementing a functional screening approach whereby primary cells from hem malignancy patients can be tested ex vivo for sensitivity to a library of small-molecule inhibitors. This assay has now been cumulatively applied to over 2,000 patient specimens, and this large data set has been leveraged to inform numerous findings that offer new diagnostic and therapeutic options for hem malignancy patients.