Bio:

Dr. Russell Jones is a leading expert in the study of metabolism and immunology. As professor and chair of the Department of Metabolism and Nutritional Programming at Van Andel Institute, his work seeks to uncover how cancer cells and immune cells fuel themselves through metabolic interactions, with the ultimate goal of developing innovative approaches for immunometabolic therapy.

Formerly the director of the Metabolomics Core Facility at McGill University’s Goodman Cancer Research Centre, Jones moved to Van Andel Institute in 2018 to establish its Metabolism and Nutritional Programming group and build new collaborations. He and his team investigate how cancer cells and immune cells adjust their metabolism in response to extracellular stimuli through signal transduction pathways and epigenetic mechanisms. His research with the Allen Institute and Dr. Yasmine Belkaid of the National Institutes of Health takes this work a step further investigating the impact of systemic pressures, such as infection or diet, as well as untangling the impact of the microbiome.

Dr. Jones has earned numerous accolades throughout his career, including a New Investigator Award from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Bernard and Francine Dorval Prize from the Canadian Cancer Society, and several teaching awards at McGill University. He was named a William Dawson Scholar in 2014 and elected to the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada in 2015. He and his team have published more than 90 scientific articles, and his work has been featured in the journals Cell Metabolism, Immunity, Science, Nature Immunology, the Journal of Immunology, and Cell. Jones earned his B.Sc. (biochemistry) and Ph.D. (medical biophysics) from the University of Toronto before completing a postdoctoral fellowship in the lab of Dr. Craig B. Thompson at University of Pennsylvania.