Melissa Lechner, MD, PhD
Assistant Professor of Medicine
About
Melissa G. Lechner, MD, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Metabolism at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine. After undergraduate studies in Public Health at Berkeley, she completed a combined MD/PhD in the USC/CalTech program in Los Angeles. She completed residencies in Medicine and Pediatrics in Boston at the Harvard Medical School hospitals before returning to Los Angeles for her clinical endocrinology fellowship at UCLA.
As a physician scientist, Dr. Lechner’s clinical and research interests are related to endocrine disease resulting from cancer immunotherapy and advanced thyroid cancer. Her work seeks to understand the cause of immune related adverse events from cancer immunotherapy so that new therapies can be developed for patients that reduce autoimmune toxicities without compromising anti-cancer efficacy. She established the Onco-Endocrinology clinic at UCLA and serves on the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) Management of Immunotherapy Toxicity Side Effects guidance panel. In addition, she leads multiple prospective clinical trials at UCLA studying thyroid disease and cancer immunotherapy and her research is funded by the American Thyroid Association, the Aramont Charitable Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health.