Maura Gillison is a medical oncologist and molecular epidemiologist. She was among the first scientists to establish an association between human papillomavirus infection and head and neck cancer. Her body of work has caused a paradigm shift in concepts of risk and management of head and neck cancer and has had significant implications for prevention, screening, diagnostics, prognostics and therapy. Gillison earned an M.D. and Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University before joining the Hopkins faculties in oncology, epidemiology and molecular microbiology and immunology. She was recruited to Ohio State in 2009 to occupy the Jeg Coughlin Chair of Cancer Research at the OSU Comprehensive Cancer Center. Gillison has published extensively in journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the National Cancer Institute and Journal of Clinical Oncology. She continues this work through broad collaborations spanning public health, oncology and genomic analysis.