Vignesh Gunasekharan, Ph.D.

Vignesh Gunasekharan, Ph.D., is the Director of PREVENT Program Operations and the Contractor Officer’s Representative in the Chemopreventive Agent Development Research Group (CADRG), Division of Cancer Prevention (DCP), National Cancer Institute (NCI).  In this role, he oversees and coordinates the PREVENT Cancer Preclinical Drug Development Program (PREVENT) activities from the time of application receipt through project completion.

Dr. Gunasekharan also coordinates Cancer Prevention-Interception Targeted Agent Discovery Program (CAP-IT) activities and serves as a Program Director and Project Officer for cooperative agreements of CAP-IT specialized centers.

At the divisional level, he represents DCP in several NCI initiatives such as the Innovative Molecular Analysis Technologies (IMAT) Program, S³ (synthetic, systems and spatial) Innovation Lab, and Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program.

Dr. Gunasekharan joined DCP in 2021, following an 11-year research career in molecular oncology and virology. He holds a Ph.D. in molecular cancer biology from Queen’s University in the United Kingdom. He completed his postdoctoral training at Northwestern University studying host-pathogen interactions during Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) pathogenesis.

Before joining CADRG, Dr. Gunasekharan worked as a faculty member and lab director at the Yale Cancer Center, where he led a preclinical drug discovery team focused on developing targeted therapeutics for triple-negative breast cancer.