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Joan Levy, PhD, serves as the Senior Director of Special Projects for the Melanoma Research Alliance. In this role she is responsible for building and leading a drug and target discovery and validation program for acral melanoma. Joan has more than 30 years of experience in oncology research in academic, pharmaceutical, and disease foundation settings with extensive knowledge spanning from therapeutic target identification and preclinical drug screening approaches to driving the results into meaningful clinical studies. For the past 13 years she has worked at two oncology disease foundations. Most recently at the Chordoma Foundation, Joan was responsible for oversight of research activities and in particular focused on programs involving identification of new therapeutic targets, further development of the Foundation's Drug Screening Program, and advancement of new drugs and combination approaches into the clinic. The 10 years prior to joining the Chordoma Foundation, Joan led a variety of research programs at the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation (MMRF) ranging from spearheading different grant programs to working closely with their affiliate consortium on large genomics projects, registries and coordinating early clinical trials between consortium sites and industry partners. Prior to joining the MMRF, Joan was responsible for coordinating an oncology pipeline of early drug discovery projects at Bayer Pharmaceuticals.

Joan received her BS in Biology from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and earned a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Vermont College of Medicine. She completed two postdoctoral fellowships in oncology research focusing on oncogenes and signal transduction pathways at the Rockefeller University and at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.