Dr. Gary L. Ellison was appointed acting director of the Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences (DCCPS) at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in January 2026. In this position, Dr. Ellison oversees a division that covers a wide range of scientific domains and disciplines, including epidemiology, behavioral science, surveillance and statistics, implementation science, cancer survivorship, and health services and outcomes research. Prior to his current position, Dr. Ellison served as the division’s deputy director.
Previously, Dr. Ellison served as chief of the Environmental Epidemiology Branch (EEB) in the division’s Epidemiology and Genomics Research Program (EGRP), where he oversaw extramural research focused on modifiable factors and cancer risk. He joined EGRP as an epidemiologist and program director in 2008, becoming chief of EEB in 2016. While serving as chief of EEB, he simultaneously served as acting director of the Division of Extramural Research and Training at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in 2021. Prior to joining EGRP, Dr. Ellison worked as a faculty member in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. He was also a contractor for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where he was project manager for the National Program of Cancer Registries Cancer Surveillance System (NPCR-CSS).
Dr. Ellison was an ex-officio member of the National Advisory Environmental Health Sciences Council (NAEHS) and serves as the designated federal official (or executive secretary) for the National Cancer Advisory Board’s ad hoc subcommittee on Population Science, Epidemiology, and Disparities. He is the recipient of NIH Director’s Awards for the 2010 Gulf Oil Spill Response (2011); NIH Working Group for the US-China Biomedical Research Cooperation Program (2013); GEOHealth Team for conceptualizing and implementing the Global Environmental and Occupational Health (GEOHealth) Program (2018); and for excellence in the development and management of the Breast Cancer and the Environment Research Program (2020). In 2014, he received an NIH Award of Merit for providing sustained leadership, scientific direction, and programmatic management for the Breast Cancer and the Environment Research Program, and in 2023, he received an NCI Director’s Award of Merit for establishing and promoting a research agenda and advancing scientific discovery in cannabis and cancer.
Dr. Ellison holds a Master of Public Health from the Division of Biostatistics at Emory University Rollins School of Public Health and a PhD in epidemiology from the University of South Carolina. Dr. Ellison’s doctoral training was in cancer epidemiology. He completed postdoctoral training at Howard University’s National Human Genome Center in Washington, DC, and at NCI as a cancer prevention fellow.