Russ, MD, PhD

Dr. Jenkins obtained his Bachelor's degree in biology at the University of Virginia in 2002 and his MD/PhD at the Medical University of South Carolina in 2012. He completed his internship and residency in Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in 2014 and his clinical oncology training in the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center in 2017. He conducted his post-doctoral research in Dr. David Barbie's lab at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute where he developed a novel platform to study ex vivo response to PD1- blockade using organotypic tumor spheroids. In 2018, he joined the faculty at the MGH Cancer Center in the Center for Melanoma and Center for Cancer Research and was an Associate Member of the Cancer Program at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Dr. Jenkins was the inaugural Termeer Early Career Investigator in Systems Pharmacology, and member of the Laboratory for Systems Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Jenkins returned to MUSC in 2025 as the Cecilia and Vincent Peng Endowed Chair in Melanoma and Cutaneous Oncology with appointments in the Department of Medicine, Division of Hematology-Oncology, Department of Dermatology and Dermatologic Surgery, and Department of Pharmacology \& Immunology. The Jenkins laboratory studies mechanisms of response and resistance to immune checkpoint blockade and adoptive cellular therapy with a focus on developing rational combination therapies to overcome resistance to cancer immunotherapy.