Dr. David Gewirtz received his Ph.D. from the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine/The City University of New York in 1978 in Physiology/Biomedical Sciences. His post-doctoral work and entire scientific career have been spent at Virginia Commonwealth University (previously known as the Medical College of Virginia) working in the cancer field. Research in his laboratory for the past 40 years has been directed toward the areas of experimental chemotherapy and radiotherapy in cancer, with a primary focus on chemosensitization and radiosensitization. These efforts have also served to define autophagy and senescence (rather than apoptosis) as primary responses to both chemotherapy and radiotherapy in solid tumor cell models. Primary findings in his laboratory have been the identification of the existence of cytostatic, cytotoxic, and nonprotective functions of autophagy in lung cancer cells and breast cancer cells and establishing the capacity of tumor cells induced into senescence by chemotherapy and radiation to undergo proliferative recovery, potentially as models of tumor dormancy and disease recurrence. These findings have challenged long-held paradigms in their respective fields. Recent efforts have turned to the strategy of utilizing senolytic agents to eliminate the senescent tumor population in striving to prevent proliferative recovery and, by extension, disease recurrence in breast, lung, prostate, and head and neck cancer. In addition, ongoing collaborative projects are designed to mitigate the toxicity of cancer chemotherapy, specifically peripheral neuropathy, aromatase inhibitor induced arthralgia, renal toxicity of cisplatin, severe delayed onset diarrhea induced by irinotecan in the treatment of colorectal cancer, and chemobrain associated with doxorubicin, cyclophosphamide, and aromatase inhibitors. Dr. Gewirtz’s work is currently supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program. He has also served for the past 15 years as the Principal Investigator for the American Cancer Society Institutional Research Program at Virginia Commonwealth University. He has recently edited two volumes of the Advances in Cancer Research series on Strategies to Mitigate the Toxicity of Cancer Therapeutics as well as Autophagy and Senescence in Cancer Therapy.