The Health Professionals Follow-Up Study began in 1986 when more than 51,000 male health professionals were recruited to participate in a longitudinal health study of cancer and other diseases. Dr. Mucci joined Dr. Walter Willett as co-PI of the HPFS, and served as director of the Tumor Repository from 2006-2024. This cohort has made important discoveries in our understanding of men’s health, including cancer, cardiovascular disease, neurologic conditions, and health aging. In addition to detailed health questionnaires, the cohort includes biospecimens including blood, DNA, tumor tissue, and toenails. The study is ongoing, and our participants, who are in their 80s, 90s, and even 100s, are still highly engaged in completing the health questionnaires.

In the United States, there are an estimated 180,000 patients living with an advanced form of prostate cancer. These patients are at greatest risk of impairments to quality of life and mortality due to the cancer itself, treatments, and other factors. To understand the survivorship experience of patients with advanced prostate cancer, Dr. Mucci designed and served as founding co-PI of this global disease registry of 5,000 patients with advanced prostate cancer (https://ironmanregistry.org/).

This study is enrolling patients with advanced prostate cancer currently in 15 countries including in North America, Europe, the Caribbean, Africa, and Australia. The goal of this registry is to understand patterns of care for people with advanced prostate cancer, to identify optimal treatment sequences that improve survival and quality of life, as well as to identify biomarkers for subgroups of patients who will respond well (or poorly) to specific therapy combinations.

Another major initiative within IRONMAN is the Diversity Working Group, with the aim of recruiting a diverse patient population. The study is collecting information on treatments, demographics, clinical, lifestyle information, survival and patient-reported clinical outcomes, and a prospective biorepository.

In the United States alone, more than 17 million individuals are cancer survivors, a number that is expected to rise substantially given the increasing number of people diagnosed with cancer and people living longer with the disease. Our group is interested in epidemiological approaches to investigate factors to improve cancer survivorship.

Dr. Mucci is actively involved in several international studies of physical activity interventions that could improve survival, enhance the efficacy of therapeutic interventions, and as improve overall health and quality of life that would provide maximum benefit to men. She served on the Scientific Advisory Committee for a global exercise intervention among people with metastatic prostate cancer funded by the men’s health organization, Movember. Within the HPFS cohort, we are investigating prostate cancer survivorship including studies on sleep quality, the role of social support, and cardiometabolic health. Within the IRONMAN registry, Dr. Mucci is leading studies to understand the trajectory of quality of life in patients with advanced prostate cancer.

There is an increasing appreciation that cancer is not a monolith, and that clinical and molecular subtypes of prostate cancer are important from both an etiologic perspective as well as prognosis and response to therapy. Dr. Mucci helped to launch the Transdisciplinary Prostate Cancer Partnership (ToPCaP), an international, multidisciplinary effort whose objective is to integrate prostate cancer tissue biomarkers to address questions in etiology, prognosis, and treatment. In addition, she was a founding member of the National Cancer Institute’s Prostate Cancer Cohort Consortium (PC3) which brought together researchers and cohorts to investigate prostate tumor biomarkers.

The projects are undertaken in concert with the DF/HCC SPORE in Prostate Cancer, for which she leads the Population Science project and is an active member of the leadership team. This research aims to use biomarkers to examine molecular subtypes of cancer, identify biomarkers of prognosis, as well as understand mechanisms underlying the link between risk factors and cancer incidence.

Dr. Mucci is passionate about teaching and mentoring and was honored to receive the 2022 Harvard Mentoring Award. She is the faculty director for the Epidemiology Master’s in Science program and serves on the department’s educational committee. Since 2007, Dr. Mucci has been the course instructor of Epidemiology of Cancer (EPI213) together with Dr. Ed Giovannucci. For three years, she co-led a two-week bootcamp course at Harvard Medical School titled Molecular Pathology and Epidemiology of Cancer, which has resulted in a textbook, Molecular Pathology and Epidemiology of Cancer. She has served as a faculty mentor for the T32 Cancer Epidemiology training grant and the Quantitative Sciences for Cancer Research at Harvard Chan School.

For 11 years, Dr. Mucci was a faculty member for the American Association for Cancer Research Integrative Molecular Epidemiology Workshop, serving as co-director between 2016 and 2023. Additional mentoring activities include formal mentoring of doctoral and MPH students at Harvard Chan School, including in epidemiology, environmental health, and biostatistics; research mentoring of numerous clinical fellows in urology, medical oncology, and radiation oncology at the Harvard teaching hospitals and the Dana Farber/Harvard Cancer Center (DF/HCC), creating educational opportunities, mentoring and career development for students and fellows through her role as head of the cancer epidemiology track at Harvard Chan School. Finally, she has spearheaded efforts to support early-stage investigators in cancer population sciences through her role at the DF/HCC.