Josephine Taverna, M.D.

Dr. Josephine Taverna was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, and raised in New York City. She attended Yale College and majored in molecular biophysics and biochemistry. Dr. Taverna graduated from Mount Sinai School of Medicine and completed fellowship training in skin oncology, hematology oncology, cancer care and prevention, and drug development.

She’s a physician-scientist and her research is focused on harnessing single cell-omics from the bench to select targeted therapies for lung cancer patients. Over the past three years, she has been developing an independent research program in lung cancer therapeutics at the University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio. In the thoracic oncology clinic, she has been enrolling patients with advanced lung cancer into clinical trials and provides them with novel therapies when standard treatments are no longer effective.  

In the research lab, she has been conducting ex vivo drug experiments in organoids to mechanistically interrogate oncogenic pathways in lung adenocarcinoma cells and the tumor microenvironment network. This work is centered on the identification of potential biomarkers of treatment response, through which we can carefully select lung patients who will likely achieve long-term responses to novel targeted therapies.