Dr. Simon Roy, M.D., M.H.S, joins the GCI in a joint appointment with McGill’s Department of Pathology

We are pleased to welcome Dr. Simon F. Roy, M.D., M.H.S., to the Rosalind and Morris Goodman Cancer Institute (GCI) in a joint appointment with McGill University’s Department of Pathology.

Dr. Roy is a dermatopathologist whose research bridges clinical practice and molecular oncology. He joins us from Yale School of Medicine, where he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Bosenberg Lab (2022–2025). There, he helped develop ex-vivo precision-cut tumor slice cultures that preserve the native 3D tumor microenvironment, creating “patient avatars” for testing drug combinations and modeling therapeutic responses. A key focus of his work was ferroptosis, a regulated form of cell death involved in anti-melanoma immunity. He showed that CD8+ T cells drive ferroptosis in melanoma cells by modulating GPX4 expression, requiring direct tumor–T cell contact. These findings, supported by single-cell RNA sequencing, are the basis of multiple publications currently in press in Cancer Research and Molecular Cancer Therapeutics.

Dr. Roy earned his MD and Master of Surgery from McGill, completed his anatomical pathology residency at Université de Montréal, and holds a Master of Health Science from Yale. He is the recipient of several honors, including the 2023 Melanoma Research Alliance Dermatology Fellowship Award for his work on prognostic models in acral melanoma in patients with skin of color.

At the GCI, Dr. Roy will launch a research program investigating spatial and epigenetic mechanisms of immunotherapy resistance in melanoma, with a focus on rare and understudied subtypes such as acral melanoma—one of the most common melanoma types in patients with skin of color. These subtypes remain critically underrepresented in research despite their disproportionate impact on diverse patient populations. His lab will integrate genome-wide DNA methylation analysis, spatial transcriptomics and proteomics, and circulating tumor DNA studies using ancestry-specific genotyping to develop inclusive biomarkers and predictive models.

He will also build international cohorts for large-scale methylation profiling and continue advancing tumor slice culture platforms for testing therapies and profiling immune responses. His work will be supported by robust bioinformatics pipelines capable of integrating spatial multi-omics data to map treatment effects at single-cell resolution.

We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Roy to our interdisciplinary research community.

Learn more about Dr. Roy’s research here: 
Principal Investigators | Goodman Cancer Institute