The J. Samuel Staub, MD Professorship

J. Samuel StaubEstablished in 2005, the professorship was created by the bequest of J. Samuel Staub, MD (1885–1977), an alumnus of the Perelman School of Medicine Class of 1915. The Professorship is awarded to a nationally prominent educator and physician, focusing particularly on continued research and innovation in the field of cancer.

The son and grandson of physicians, Dr. Staub was born and raised in Philadelphia. He moved to California as a young man and after graduation from the Perelman School, he returned to San Jose, CA to start a practice in family medicine. During World War I, he served in the Medical Corps of the U.S. Navy and then traveled to New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and London to further his medical education. He returned to San Jose, where he became a prominent member of the medical community.


Roger GreenbergCurrent Chairholder
Roger Greenberg, MD, PhD

Roger Greenberg, MD, PhD, is the J. Samuel Staub, M.D. Professor in the Department of Cancer Biology and Director of the Penn Center for Genome Integrity and the Scientific Director of the Basser Center for BRCA at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. Dr. Greenberg’s laboratory investigates basic mechanisms of genome integrity maintenance and their impact on cancer etiology and response to therapy. His group discovered ubiquitin as critical to DNA damage recognition by BRCA1, biallelic mutations in BRCA1 as a cause of Fanconi Anemia, ALC1 as a new drug target in BRCA mutant cancers, and visualization of transcriptional silencing adjacent to DNA double-strand breaks. Dr. Greenberg’s group has also established methodologies to investigate nearly every step of recombination dependent telomere lengthening in real time. A more recent direction of his research involves understanding communication between the DNA damage and immune responses. Several of these fundamental discoveries from the Greenberg laboratory have been translated, inspiring clinical trials for combination chemo -and immune- therapy trials in BRCA mutant cancers.

Dr. Greenberg is a recipient of numerous awards, including the Michael Brown New Investigator Award for Basic Science, Kimmel Scholar Award in Translational Science, Charles E. Culpeper Scholarship in Medical Sciences, a Harrington Discovery Institute Scholar-Innovator Award, the Stanley N. Cohen Award for Biomedical Research, and the Memorial Sloan Kettering William L. Gerald Award. He regularly serves as a keynote speaker at international conferences and has also been elected to the American Society of Clinical Investigation and American Association of Physicians. Dr. Greenberg previously chaired the DNA Mechanisms of Cancer study section for the American Cancer Society and completed service as a member of the NIH Cancer Etiology Study Section.

Dr. Greenberg received his MD and PhD from The Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and completed postdoctoral training at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Previous Chairholders

  • Craig B. Thompson, MD 2005–2008
  • Lewis A. Chodosh, MD, PhD 2009–2012
  • J. Alan Diehl, PhD 2012–2014