Rushika M. Perera PhD

• Deborah Cowan Professor, School of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco
• Vice Chair, Department of Anatomy, University of California, San Francisco
• Chief Scientific Officer, UCSF Pancreas Center
• Executive Committee Member, UC Pancreas Cancer Consortium

Rushika M. Perera PhD is a Professor in the School of Medicine and Vice Chair of the Department of Anatomy at UCSF. Dr. Perera is also the Chief Scientific Officer of the UCSF Pancreas Cancer Program and an Executive Committee Member of the UC Pancreas Cancer Consortium.

For the last decade, Dr. Perera’s research has focused on defining the cellular and molecular programs that drive pancreatic cancer. Her laboratory has made important discoveries on how pancreatic cancer cells rewire their metabolism to support growth, evade the immune system and circumvent therapeutic interventions. Her laboratory focuses on understanding how scavenging pathways such as autophagy and the lysosome – a degradative organelle – enables metabolic and cellular adaptation to stress and contributes to aggressive features of disease. Beyond mediating degradation of diverse macromolecules, the lysosome also plays an important role in signal transduction, cellular quality control, metabolism and detoxification.

Dr. Perera is the recipient of several prestigious awards including the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, the Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovation Award, the American Association for Cancer Research Next Gen Star Award and was the 2021 recipient of the Gunter Blobel Early Career Award of the American Society for Cell Biology.