Governance
Leadership Team
The Leadership Team makes day-to-day operational decisions and oversees the overall management of the Centre.
Dr. Douglas Mahoney
Director, The Riddell Centre
Associate Professor, University of Calgary
Areas of expertise: Solid tumours; CAR T; designer viruses
Nubia Zepeda
Associate Director of Business Operations, The Riddell Centre
Areas of expertise: Business operations; financial management; project management
Dr. Sorana Morrissy
Associate Director of Discovery and Innovation, The Riddell Centre
Assistant Professor, University of Calgary
Areas of expertise: Glioblastoma; computational biology; target discovery
Dr. Kyle Potts
Associate Director of Biomanufacturing, The Riddell Centre
Areas of expertise: Biomanufacturing; process development; quality control
Dr. Kevin Hay
Medical Director of Biomanufacturing, The Riddell Centre
Associate Professor, University of Calgary
Areas of expertise: CAR T; leukemia and lymphoma; clinical trials
Dr. Mona Shafey
Associate Director of Clinical Research and Translation (Adults), The Riddell Centre
Clinical Associate Professor, University of Calgary
Areas of expertise: Blood cancers; cellular therapies; clinical trials
Dr. Victor Lewis
Associate Director of Clinical Research and Translation (Pediatrics), The Riddell Centre
Associate Professor, University of Calgary
Areas of expertise: Pediatric blood cancers; CAR T; clinical trials
Dr. Nizar Bahlis
Associate Professor, University of Calgary
Areas of expertise: Multiple myeloma; immunogenomics (bulk and single cell); immunotherapy including CAR T
Zack Breckenridge
Associate Director of Product Translation, The Riddell Centre
Areas of expertise: Product translation; clinical research; CAR T-cells
Strategic Advisory Board
The Strategic Advisory Board provides strategic advice to the Centre and ensures alignment with the local cancer and immunology communities, made up of local leadership and patient partners.
International Scientific Advisory Board
The International Scientific Advisory Board evaluates the Centre’s scientific activities and provides strategic recommendations.
Dr. John Bell (Chair)
John Bell, PhD, is a Senior Scientist at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute and Professor of Medicine at the University of Ottawa. A world leader in oncolytic virus research, he founded the Canadian Oncolytic Virus Consortium, the first of its kind in the world, to advance cancer virotherapy from discovery through clinical application. He is Scientific Director of BioCanRx, Canada’s Immunotherapeutic Network, and Scientific Co-Director of Canada’s Pandemic Preparedness Hub, a national network of GMP manufacturing centres. Dr. Bell has co-founded three biotechnology companies, including Jennerex Biotherapeutics, Turnstone Biologics (NASDAQ), and Esphera SynBio, to translate his discoveries into practice. A Fellow of both the Royal Society of Canada and the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, he received the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal for his contributions to Canadian science.
Dr. Christine Brown
Christine E. Brown, PhD, is the Heritage Provider Network Professor in Immunotherapy and Professor in the Departments of Hematology & Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation and Immuno-Oncology at City of Hope’s Beckman Research Institute. She also serves as Deputy Director of the T Cell Therapeutics Research Laboratories. Dr. Brown is internationally recognized for her pioneering work in CAR T cell therapy, particularly its application to brain tumors. Her research led to the first reported complete clinical response to CAR T cell therapy in a patient with glioblastoma, a landmark achievement in the field of solid tumor immunotherapy. She has advanced multiple first-in-human clinical trials targeting IL13Rα2, HER2, and chlorotoxin, and leads multidisciplinary teams dedicated to expanding CAR T cell therapy. Over the past decade, she has led and built multi-disciplinary teams for CAR T cell GMP manufacturing, quality control release, patient correlative studies and regulatory protocol management.
Dr. Guy Ungerechts
Guy Ungerechts, MD, PhD, is a medical oncologist and molecular biologist specializing in immunotherapy and oncolytic virotherapy. He leads the Early Clinical Trial Team at the National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT) Heidelberg and co-leads the NCT Clinical Trial Center in Heidelberg within the German NCT network. Dr. Ungerechts has developed and conducted numerous early-phase trials in different oncolytic viruses and has advanced the use of oncolytic measles viruses engineered with immunomodulatory transgenes encoding for cytokines, checkpoint inhibitors, and bispecific T cell engagers. He founded CanVirex, a spin-off developing MeV-IL-12, a next-generation virotherapy agent now in clinical application. His research bridges laboratory and clinical translation, with the goal of developing innovative, immunotherapeutics, including viral and cellular therapies, for cancer treatment.
Dr. Trevor J. Pugh
Trevor J. Pugh, PhD, is a board-certified clinical molecular geneticist (ACMG/ABMGG) and genome scientist who has pioneered application of genome sequencing to the management of cancer patients. He is the Scientific Director of the Princess Margaret Genomics Centre, Canada’s largest provider of single cell genomics services, and Director of Innovation for the University Health Network’s Laboratory Medicine Program, one of the largest academic diagnostic labs in the world. Dr. Pugh’s research focuses on the application of cell-free DNA, immune repertoire, and single-cell RNA sequencing to clinical specimens. With over 200 publications and 48,000 citations, he has been recognized among Canada’s Top 40 Under 40 and inducted to the Royal Society of Canada College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. His laboratory’s discoveries have shaped early cancer detection, immunotherapy response monitoring, and genomic data sharing initiatives that are advancing precision oncology across Canada and internationally.
Dr. Stan Riddell
Stan Riddell, MD, is a Professor of Medicine at the University of Washington and holds the Burke O’Reilly Family Endowed Chair in Cancer Immunotherapy at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. He is also a Distinguished Affiliate Professor at the Technical University of Munich, where he served as a Hans Fischer Senior Fellow. Dr. Riddell’s research focuses on the biology and therapeutic potential of T cells. His laboratory developed the CD19-specific CAR and provided the foundational preclinical and clinical data for Breyanzi, an FDA-approved CD19 CAR T cell product commercialized by Juno Therapeutics and now marketed by Bristol Myers Squibb. With more than 300 publications, 27 patents, and several biotech co-founding, including Juno Therapeutics, Lyell, and Outpace Bio, he is a pioneer in translational immunotherapy. Dr. Riddell was elected to the Association of American Physicians in 2010 and was made an Honorary Fellow of the German Society of Oncology in 2022.
Dr. Isabelle Rivière
Isabelle Rivière, PhD, is Vice President, Cell Therapy Sciences at Takeda. She is an internationally recognized leader in cell therapy and genetic engineering with over 25 years of experience advancing cell-based immunotherapies from concept to clinical testing. Before joining Takeda in 2023, Dr. Rivière led a research laboratory at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where her work focused on developing and manufacturing CAR T cell therapies for more than 500 patients with hematologic malignancies and solid tumors. Her work enabled MSKCC to obtain FDA Breakthrough and Orphan drug designation for the treatment of acute lymphoblastic leukemia with CD19 CAR T cells in 2014. She is Scientific Co-founder of Juno Therapeutics Inc. Dr. Rivière earned her PhD in Cellular and Molecular Biology from the University of Paris, conducting research at the Institut Curie and the Whitehead Institute, Cambridge, MA. She received the Jerry Mendell Award for Translational Science in 2023 and the Richard N. Merkin Prize in Biomedical Technology in 2025.
