Maria Pietanza MD

Dr. Maria Catherine (Cathy) Pietanza attended the College of Arts and Sciences at New York University, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry and Italian. Cathy received her medical degree from The State University of New York Health Science Center at Brooklyn/Downstate in Brooklyn, New York in 2001. She completed her residency in Internal Medicine at New York Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, and a fellowship in Medical Oncology and Hematology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, where she was also a chief fellow.

Upon completing a fellowship in 2007, she was appointed as an Assistant Attending Physician at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where her primary clinical responsibility was in thoracic oncology, and as an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College. At Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Cathy led the Small Cell Lung Cancer Research Program and was a principal and co-principal investigator on clinical trials in small cell and non-small cell lung cancer, as well as pulmonary neuroendocrine tumors. She completed several investigator-initiated trials and company-sponsored clinical studies. Cathy developed a comprehensive program for prospective molecular profiling of small-cell lung cancer patients undergoing treatment, in an attempt to better understand the molecular mechanisms of this disease and develop more effective therapeutic strategies. One additional aspect of her research was to evaluate the importance of utilizing patient-reported outcomes in clinical trials to guide symptom management. She has co-authored numerous articles, reviews, and book chapters, published in such journals as the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Clinical Cancer Research, Nature Genetics, and Cancer, and has been an invited lecturer and presenter at national and international meetings.

In January 2016, she joined Merck Research Laboratories within the Global Center of Scientific Affairs as Global Director, Scientific Affairs for Oncology, where she led the Merck Investigator Initiated Studies Program for Oncology and assisted in executing the Oncology Scientific Leadership Strategy. Following her passion to conduct clinical research, she changed her role at Merck in April 2018 and has been responsible for the development and implementation of several phase III trials utilizing the immune checkpoint inhibitor, pembrolizumab (Keytruda ®). In November 2018, she became the Product Development Team Lead for Keytruda in Thoracic Malignancies, leading a program and series of studies in several lung cancers, as well as the strategy for pembrolizumab and other products in these diseases.