Rebekah White

Dr. Rebekah White completed medical school and general surgery residency at Duke University. During residency, she worked for three years in a nucleic acid therapeutics laboratory, which would later become the focus of her research career. After general surgery residency, she completed surgical oncology fellowship at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center then returned to Duke as faculty in 2007.  While her laboratory research was primarily focused on nucleic acids, she became interested in irreversible electroporation (IRE), both as a clinical therapy for patients with pancreatic cancer but also for its potential to help overcome some of the barriers to delivery of nucleic acid therapeutics to tumors.  She was recruited to University of California San Diego (UCSD) in 2016 to continue these research efforts, and her laboratory is studying immune responses to IRE and ways to improve them.  Her UCSD time is divided roughly 50/50 between clinical and research activities.  Outside of UCSD, she is involved in several surgical organizations, including the Society of University Surgeons (as President-Elect) and the Society of Clinical Surgery (as Treasurer).