Pauline Funchain

Pauline Funchain, MD, joins the Stanford Cancer Institute

The Stanford Cancer Institute (SCI) is excited to welcome new faculty member Pauline Funchain, MD, to Stanford as an associate professor of medicine (oncology). She joins Kavita Sarin, MD, PhD, as co-director of the Skin Cancer Genomics Program, and Tamiko Katsumoto, MD, as co-leader of the Immune Related Toxicity Working Group. 

At the Stanford Cancer Institute, she will work with Allison Betof Warner, MD, PhD, and Sunil Arani Reddy, MD, in the cutaneous oncology advanced disease realm. 

Funchain specializes in medical oncology of melanoma, high-risk skin cancers, and cancer genetics. She offers additional expertise in other cutaneous malignancies, Merkel cell carcinoma, and skin cancer genomics and immunotoxicology.

She conducts translational science research focusing on the genetics and genomics, both germline and somatic, of cancer. Her primary research interests are in the genetics and genomics of melanoma, the practical translation of genomic data into clinical precision oncology, and predictors of clinical outcomes and adverse events related to immunotherapy. 

She is the lead investigator in the philanthropically backed Gross Family Melanoma Registry, an actively accruing study of familial melanoma.

She has served as director of the Melanoma Oncology Program, co-director of the Comprehensive Melanoma Program, and director of the Genomics Program at the Taussig Cancer Institute of the Cleveland Clinic. 

Funchain co-chaired the inaugural American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Guidelines Panel on Systemic Therapy in Melanoma and serves on the ASCO Guidelines Panel on Immune Related Adverse Events (irAEs). She developed and leads the first irAE tumor board established in the U.S. and the Management of Checkpoint Inhibitor Toxicity,  the first medical conference focused on the advancement of irAE management. 

She received a Bachelor of Arts in Bioethics from Pomona College and her medical degree from the Ohio State College of Medicine. She completed internal medicine training at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center and a hematology-oncology fellowship at the Cleveland Clinic.

June 2023
Amended January 2024
By Katie Shumake