The Richard and Barbara Schiffrin President’s Distinguished Professorship
Long-time supporters of the Abramson Cancer Center, Richard and Barbara Schiffrin created the Professorship in 2016. The chair supports a faculty member at the Perelman School of Medicine with a preference towards physicians and/or scientists focusing on immunology or other leading-edge research.
Through their volunteer activities at the Abramson Cancer Center, the Schiffrins have observed the excitement in the scientific community worldwide around Penn’s revolutionary advances in immunotherapy. Through the Professorship, they are providing resources needed to develop these life-saving breakthroughs as fully as possible. Barbara and Richard generously support innovative cancer and disease research at Penn Medicine and the Abramson Cancer Center. They are both members of the Abramson Cancer Center Director’s Leadership Council.
Richard S. Schiffrin is a class action securities attorney. He lectures on corporate governance and securities litigation in the U.S. and Europe. Mr. Schiffrin is well known for his political and philanthropic activities. He served as Hillary Clinton’s Pennsylvania Finance Chair in the 2008 election, and he continued his fundraising efforts for her during the most recent campaign. He has also tried his hand as a movie producer. Barbara Schiffrin, PsyD is a retired clinical psychologist. She owns The Cashmere Goat, a knitting store in Camden, ME, and is currently teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) to refugees in Philadelphia. She is also involved in many political and charitable causes.
President’s Distinguished Professorships are awarded to eminent faculty members with research and teaching expertise in areas identified by Penn’s President as high priorities. The creation of President’s Distinguished Professorships at the Perelman School of Medicine has been supported by the challenge gift of Penn University Trustees and Penn Medicine Board members George A. Weiss and Richard W. Vague.
Current Chairholder
E. John Wherry, PhD
E. John Wherry, PhD is currently the Director of the Institute for Immunology, Chair of the Department of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics, Director of the Colton Center for Autoimmunity at Penn, and Richard and Barbara Schiffrin President’s Distinguished Professor at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania since 2016.
Dr. Wherry is also co-director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at Penn, playing a key role in this first-of-its-kind collaborative effort to bring together the United States’ top medical schools and cancer centers to accelerate breakthrough immunotherapy research, turning more cancers into curable diseases. After completing his undergraduate degree at the Pennsylvania State University, Dr. Wherry earned his PhD in Immunology from Thomas Jefferson University and completed his postdoctoral research fellowship at Emory University.
Dr. Wherry’s personal research expertise focuses on T cell exhaustion in chronic infections and cancer, and on the mechanisms by which it is controlled by immunoregulatory “checkpoint” pathways, such as PD-1. His work has defined the molecular mechanisms of T cell exhaustion, helping to identify key principles about inhibitory receptor blockade and co-blockade to reverse T cell exhaustion in settings where the immune system fails. Recently, Dr. Wherry’s team has also applied novel high dimensional immune profiling approaches to identify clinical predictors of response to cancer immunotherapy and to interrogate underlying mechanisms. These platforms have been instrumental during the COVID-19 pandemic to identify immune fingerprints of disease and define the Immune Health patterns that determine individual responses to infections, vaccines, and therapeutics. Dr. Wherry has authored more than 250 publications in top international journals, including Nature, Science, Cell, Nature Immunology, Nature Medicine, and Immunity. He leads Penn Medicine’s research team as part of the Allen Institute for Immunology and serves on several scientific advisory boards, including The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research, the Ragon Institute, and the Cancer Research Institute.