Dr. Allan Hildesheim
Dr. Allan Hildesheim, senior investigator and former chief of the Infections and Immunoepidemiology Branch (IIB), retired from NCI’s Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics after 33 years of service at the end of 2020.
As the inaugural chief of IIB, Hildesheim built a multidisciplinary research program focused on the interplay of infection, immunity and inflammation on cancer risk and helped translate those findings into important advances in cancer prevention, risk stratification and screening. As an investigator, he devoted his career to the study of host and viral factors involved in the pathogenesis of DNA virus-related tumors.
Hildesheim began his career at NCI in 1987 as a predoctoral fellow in the precursor to DCEG, the Division of Cancer Etiology. He earned his Ph.D. in epidemiology from Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health in 1991 and completed his doctoral dissertation studying the interactions of herpes simplex virus 2 (HSV2) a