Satdarshan Monga

Summary

Dr. Paul Monga is an Academic Physician with an interest in furthering our understanding of many aspects of liver health and disease. His lab has been focused on elucidating the cellular and molecular underpinnings of hepatic pathophysiology, especially of liver development, repair, and tumorigenesis. His research has been consistently funded by NIH and industry since 2003, and he is currently PI/MPI on three R01s. He has published 230 manuscripts and reviews in peer-reviewed journals like Hepatology, Gastroenterology, Journal of Hepatology, American Journal of Pathology, Cell Metabolism, Cell Reports, Cell Reports Medicine, Nature, and others. Dr. Monga has been inducted into ASCI and AAP and has received several other award and honors. Currently, he serves as the president of the American Society of Investigative Pathology. He is also the editor-in-chief for the Seminars in Liver Disease and associate/consulting editor for Science Signaling, Annual Reviews in Pathology and JCI Insights.

Dr. Monga holds an MD degree from Dayanand Medical College and Hospital, Ludhiana, and Punjab University, Chandigarh, India. He did his Postdoctoral Fellowships in Gastroenterology and Molecular Biology at the Veterans Association Medical Center in Washington, DC from 1996-1999. He joined the Department of Pathology at the University of Pittsburgh in 1999, promoted to faculty in 2001, rose through the ranks to become professor and chief and vice chair of the division of Experimental Pathology. He also served as assistant dean and codirector of the Medical Scientist Training Program. In 2024, Dr. Monga was appointed as the Director of the new Organ Pathobiology and Therapeutics Institute, rebranding of the Drug Discovery Institute, and the Associate Dean of Research at the School of Medicine. He is currently a Professor of Pharmacology and Medicine, and a Senior Vice Chancellor Endowed Chair in Pathobiology and Therapeutics. He is also the founding director of the Pittsburgh Liver Research Center, an NIH, NIDDK funded Digestive Diseases Research Core Center through P30, and the program director of the Cellular Approaches to Tissue Engineering and Regeneration (CATER) Training Program, NIH, NIBIB funded T32.

His research especially in the area of liver cancer is quite impactful. He has focused on molecular subsets of HCC that are driven by mutations in components of the Wnt pathway that have led to improved understanding of tumor biology through better models and more recently to successful targeting this subtype. Today, he will talk about the importance of the Wnt pathway in HCC and its translational implications.