Over the course of her career, Elsa R. Flores, Ph.D., has drawn a wide range of professional honors that reflect her standing in cancer research. Her early recognition came in the form of fellowships from the National Institutes of Health, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, and the American Cancer Society. She was later named a Rita Allen Foundation Scholar and an American Cancer Society Research Scholar, and she held the NCI Outstanding Investigator Award from 2016 to 2024. She has been named a Moffitt Distinguished Scholar for the years 2016 through 2026, was appointed the Kaul Foundation Endowed Chair in 2022, and was selected as a V Foundation All Star for 2026 through 2031. In 2017 she delivered the AACR-Boston Ruth Sager Memorial Lecture, a distinction extended to leading cancer biology researchers.

These honors rest on a research program that Dr. Flores has led for more than two decades. Her work centers on the p53 family of tumor suppressor genes, with a particular emphasis on the roles that p63 and p73 play in cancer development, metastasis, and treatment resistance. Through this research she has advanced scientific understanding of how these genes control stem cell maintenance, metabolism, and tumor progression, and her findings have been published in some of the most prominent journals in the field.

Currently, Dr. Flores is a Senior Member in the Department of Molecular Oncology at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida, and she holds secondary appointments in the Departments of Cutaneous Oncology and Thoracic Oncology. She is also a professor in the Department of Oncologic Sciences and the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of South Florida (USF) Health Morsani College of Medicine.

Her education combined engineering and the life sciences. She received a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1994, then earned a Ph.D. in Cancer Biology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1999, completing her doctoral research at the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research. She returned to MIT for a postdoctoral fellowship in Cancer Biology.

Dr. Flores began her independent career at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, where she was appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Oncology in 2004. She earned tenure as an Associate Professor in 2010 and became a full Professor with tenure in 2015. Her leadership there included serving as Co-Director and then Director of the Genes and Development Graduate Ph.D. Program and as Co-Leader of the Metastasis Research Program under the institution's NCI Cancer Center Support Grant.