Our Founding Investigator
Dr. Pierre Massion
Pierre Massion was born March 28, 1963, in Brussels, Belgium. He received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, where he also completed a clinical fellowship and a residency.
He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in pulmonary research at the Cardiovascular Research Institute at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and later held a residency in internal medicine at UCSF-Mount Zion Medical Center and a pulmonary and critical care medicine fellowship at UCSF.
Dr. Massion worked at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) from 2001 until his death in 2021, where he specialized in cancer care and established a research lab that made multiple discoveries related to cancer biomarkers, the evaluation of pulmonary nodules, and screening protocols to improve early detection of lung cancer.
He was the Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair and professor of medicine at VUMC, and the director of the Cancer Early Detection and Prevention Initiative and co-leader of the Cancer Health Outcomes and Control Research Program at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (VICC). He was also director of faculty development in the Division of Allergy, Pulmonary, and Critical Care Medicine.
Dr. Massion was the principal investigator of several ongoing clinical trials; he authored more than 180 studies and was well regarded as a mentor to junior faculty and students at all levels.
Among many career awards, Dr. Massion received the Patricia A. Stern Award from the LUNGevity Foundation, the ASCO Foundation Advanced Clinical Research Award in Lung Cancer, and the Damon Runyon Lilly Clinical Investigator Award. He was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2015.
