Chair, Chief, Chief Scientific Officer, Deputy Director

Manmeet Ahluwalia, M.D., MBA, FASCO, is the chief scientific officer, chief of medical oncology, deputy director, and Fernandez family-endowed chair at Baptist Health Miami Cancer Institute. As a neuro-oncologist, Dr. Ahluwalia’s primary areas of research and patient care are primary brain tumors (tumors originating in the brain that can be cancerous or noncancerous) and brain metastases (cancer that originated elsewhere in the body and has spread to the brain). Dr. Ahluwalia is fluent in English, Hindi, and Punjabi.

He joined Miami Cancer Institute from the Cleveland Clinic, where he was the Dean and Diane Miller family endowed chair in neuro-oncology and the head of operations in the Rose Ella Burkhardt Brain Tumor and Neuro-Oncology Center (BBTC). He also served as a full professor in the Department of Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University.

He currently leads cancer research efforts as the Fernandez Family Foundation endowed chair in Cancer Research and the Guardian Research Network Scientific Advisory Council chairperson. He is a National Institutes of Health (NIH) RO1 grant-funded investigator on AI-based radionics in glioblastoma (GBM). He is also a clinical trial leader on an NIH PO1 grant on gender-specific differences in GBM.

In addition to his research efforts, Dr. Ahluwalia dedicates his time to mentoring other medical professionals as a professor of translational medicine at the Florida International University College of Medicine. Devoted to continuing education, he earned a master’s of business administration degree from Case Western Reserve University.

Dr. Ahluwalia helped develop a world-class clinical trials program for brain tumors at the Cleveland Clinic. These trials involved immunotherapy and precision medicine-based approaches to target genetic alterations that drive disease. His research has been published in more than 250 peer-reviewed publications, including JAMA, JAMA Oncology, Neuro-Oncology, Journal of Clinical Oncology, Clinical Cancer Research, Cancer Discovery, Nature Reviews Neurology, Nature Reviews, and Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology. In 2016, he was selected to participate in the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s Leadership Development Program. This prestigious year-long program allowed Dr. Ahluwalia to work with the top leaders in oncology from all over the world. He and his colleagues designed research for patients, caregivers, and other oncologists to help them advance the field of oncology. As part of this program, he also met with members of Congress on Capitol Hill to promote funding for cancer research.