Ashani Weeraratna

Ashani Tanuja Weeraratna (born )

Early life and education Weeraratna was born in Sri Lanka and raised in Lesotho. where she earned a bachelor's degree in 1991. Weeraratna obtained a master's in philosophy from George Washington University in 1997. She earned a doctorate in molecular and cellular oncology from the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of the George Washington University Medical Center. From 1998 to 2000, Weeraratna completed post-graduate training and was a postdoctoral fellow in experimental therapeutics and pharmacology at the Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, then known as the Johns Hopkins Oncology Center. She then joined the laboratory of Jeff Trent, then scientific director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, at the National Institutes of Health. There, she followed up on Trent and Michael Bittner's discovery of the roles of non-canonical Wnt signaling molecule Wnt5A in melanoma. This work led her to investigate the role of Wnt5A in melanoma metastasis, a research focus that she has continued to pursue throughout her career. Weeraratna joined the Wistar Institute in 2011, first as an assistant professor and then as an associate professor and program leader of the Tumor Microenvironment and Metastasis Program at the Wistar Institute. In 2016, she was named the Ira Brind associate professor at the Wistar Institute. When Weeraratna received the professorship, Wistar Institute president and CEO, Dario Altieri remarked that "...she is changing the way we understand melanoma, as she and her team seek ways to prevent and treat this dangerous disease." In 2018, Weeraratna became a full professor and co-program leader of the Immunology, Microenvironment, and Metastasis Program at the Wistar Institute.

Weeraratna joined Johns Hopkins University in 2019 as a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of cancer biology. She is the first woman to hold the E.V. McCollum Professorship and chair the department of biochemistry and molecular biology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH). In this role, she has continued her melanoma research and expanded the aging and cancer programs at JHSPH. Weeraratna holds joint appointments in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine department of oncology and the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Selected Publications