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Anna Tate Riegel, PhD joined in May, sponsored by Christine D. Berg. Christine has been a colleague and friend of Anna's for decades and has been consistently impressed with her scientific integrity and research productivity.

Anna holds the Celia Rudman Fisher Endowed Chair in Oncology and Pharmacology at Georgetown University, where she also serves as Senior Associate Dean and Vice President for Biomedical Graduate Education and Research. Perhaps most germane to the mission of ARCS, Anna has devoted a significant portion of her career to graduate medical education. In her role as Senior Associate Dean for Biomedical Graduate Education, she has shaped the training of many early-career scientists, championing rigorous scholarship and providing mentorship that reflects her own experience. She was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship early in her training and received the James Price Award for Cancer Research. Following her doctoral work, she was named a Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell Post-Doctoral Research Fellow – a distinction reserved for the most promising scientists in the nation. She subsequently earned both a Pharmaceutical Manufacturers' Association Foundation Junior Faculty Development Award and an NIH Research Career Development Award. This experience allows her to better mentor trainees in all phases of their early research career.

Anna’s research focuses on breast cancer, epigenetics, malignant progression, and metastasis, areas of urgent importance to Public Health. She has advanced the field through her work on transcriptional coactivators and their role in cancer diagnosis and treatment, as reflected in her patents on the use of FGF-BP gene promoter sequences and coactivator mechanisms in breast cancer. Her memberships in the American Endocrine Society and the American Association for Cancer Research further attest to her standing within the broader scientific community.

In her position at Georgetown, she and her colleague, Anton Wellstein, MD, hosted Meghan Barefoot, MD, PhD in their laboratory. Meghan was the 2020-21 ARCS MWC Forster Family Scholar and is now a resident at Johns Hopkins. Additionally, in her current position as Dean, Anna has helped to identify promising scholars at Georgetown as undergraduates and graduates whose work merits support from ARCS, and has met with the ARCS delegation for three years. She attended the ARCS Scholar Awards Reception at the National Academies of Science to participate in the presentation of these awards in 2025. Anna’s interest in developing the next generation of scientists aligns well with the mission of ARCS.