Steven M. Dubinett, MD

Steven Dubinett, Dean of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and Associate Vice Chancellor, is a Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Medicine, Pathology & Laboratory Medicine and Molecular & Medical Pharmacology. 

Dr. Dubinett’s research focuses on immunity and inflammation in the development of lung cancer as well as early lung cancer detection. While a pulmonary and cancer immunology research fellow in the Department of Pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital, he helped lead the first clinical trial using tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes to treat patients with cancer.  While some of the patients with renal cancer and melanoma had profound anti-tumor responses, the patients with lung cancer did not respond to the therapy. After joining the UCLA faculty in 1988, Dr. Dubinett began his research program focusing on understanding why lung cancer patients were not responding to immunotherapy.

Building on original discoveries relevant to immunity and inflammation in the pathogenesis of lung cancer, he has developed a translational research program, which now utilizes these laboratory-based discoveries in the translational research and clinical environment.  He has received uninterrupted peer-reviewed federal funding for translational lung cancer research for more than 35 years. He was the founding director of the UCLA Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) and the UCLA Lung Cancer SPORE.

As the Division Chief for Pulmonary, Critical Care, Sleep Medicine and Allergy from 2006 to 2021 he helped recruit nearly 100 faculty members, expanded the pulmonary fellowship program by fourfold and included the VA and OVMC as training sites. He combined Allergy into the division in 2006 and promoted recruitments that facilitated subspeciality areas including lung transplant, interventional pulmonology, and pulmonary hypertension. All of this was accomplished in collaboration with dedicated and creative faculty, staff and trainees.