Dr. Brian Rood

Brian is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics in the Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders at Children’s National Health System whose primary clinical focus is pediatric neuro-oncology. He has also been Lila’s Oncologist since 2010. Dr. Rood joined the faculty of Children’s National in 2002 after completing a fellowship in Pediatric Hematology/Oncology as well as a research fellowship in the molecular biology of brain tumors, both at Children’s National and Children’s Research Institute.

Dr. Rood is the Medical Director of the Neuro-Oncology program at Children’s and cares for brain tumor patients on the inpatient oncology ward and in the outpatient clinic. He is a co-principal investigator with Eugene Hwang, MD, of the Pediatric Brain Tumor Consortium clinical trial program at Children’s National and runs an active molecular biology lab in the Center for Cancer and Immunology Research. He is also the institutional PI for the Childhood Brain Tumor Tissue Consortium, a multi-institutional tissue and data repository aimed at providing essential resources for the pediatric brain tumor research community. His own lab investigates the proteogenomics of multiple pediatric brain tumors in order to identify proteins that are unique or highly expressed in tumor cells. He aims to further this work by developing immunotherapies to target these tumor-specific proteins as well as the means to use these proteins as biomarkers capable of detecting disease. Dr. Rood also is working to identify microsatellite markers in a person’s DNA that predict the risk of developing different kinds of brain tumors.