Dr. Alison Van Dyke joined the Data Quality, Analysis, and Interpretation Branch of the Surveillance Research Program (SRP) as Director of the SEER-linked Virtual Tissue Repository (VTR) Pilot Studies. For the VTR Pilot Studies, SRP works with SEER registries to obtain custom annotations of detailed treatment data for pancreas and female breast cancer cases which may have biospecimens available. The goal is to match unusual survival cases with more typical survival controls. Dr. Van Dyke also directs the Residual Tissue Repositories (RTRs). Operated by the SEER registries in Hawaii, Iowa, and Los Angeles, the RTRs collect tissue being discarded by hospital laboratories once the minimum requirement for retaining diagnostic tissue blocks, as set forth by the College of American Pathologists (CAP), has been met.

Prior to joining SRP, Dr. Van Dyke earned her MD/PhD from Wayne State University School of Medicine in 2011 with graduate training in cancer biology. Under the mentorship of Dr. Ann Schwartz, her doctoral research focused on the role of inflammation in non-small cell lung cancer among women and included SEER data. She completed postgraduate medical residency training in anatomic pathology at Yale-New Haven Hospital and surgical subspecialty training in thoracic pathology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. In addition to being board certified in Anatomic Pathology by the American Board of Pathology, she is a Fellow of the CAP and serves as the SEER Liaison to the CAP Cancer Committee, which determines what and how tumor information will be reported in pathology reports.

Gonçalo Forjaz, Research Fellow at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), has twelve years of experience in the areas of cancer registration and data analysis. His research interests include prediction of the future cancer burden, attributable causes of cancer, and age-period-cohort modeling. Gonçalo has been working with IMS and with people from several cancer registries across the world in the improvement of SEER*Prep, the NCI's software that is used to create a SEER*Stat database. As an expert in CanReg5, the international open source software for population-based cancer registries developed jointly by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and the International Association of Cancer Registries, Gonçalo has also been providing guidance and training for NCI’s work with IARC’s regional hub for the Caribbean countries. Gonçalo received his Doctorate of Veterinary Medicine from the University of Évora, Portugal and his Master of Science degree in Human Oncology from the University of Porto, Portugal. 

Jennifer Ruhl, M.S., CCS, RHIT, ODS-Certified, is a Certified Tumor Registrar/Oncology Data Specialist in the Quality Control section of the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program. Ms. Ruhl is responsible for working with and assisting the SEER registries in data collection. She also collaborates with several other standard setters to develop new data collection programs and methods.