Task Force

Michael Gieske, MD, is the Director of Lung Cancer Screening at St. Elizabeth Healthcare. He has worked with his team at St. Elizabeth Healthcare to build one of the most successful lung cancer screening programs in the country. In addition to his daily practice, he is the lead physician at his site in Ft. Mitchell, Ky., and the East Division Physician Director of Primary Care, overseeing 10 sites.

Dr. Gieske sits on the boards of the American College of Radiology, GO2 Foundation, Lung Ambition Alliance, NLCRT, LungCan, and the Rural Appalachian Lung Cancer Screening Initiative. He is a dedicated advocate for lung cancer survivors and caregivers, raising awareness and promoting policy to bring hope to patients with lung cancer and those at risk for lung cancer.

He graduated from University of Louisville Medical College in 1984, then completed his Family Practice Residency at St. Elizabeth Medical Center in Edgewood, Kentucky in 1987. 

Dr. Afreen Shariff is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Duke University and a nationally recognized Endocrinologist and with a focus on endocrine disease in cancer patients. Dr. Shariff is a transformational leader who has created and led several successful initiatives over the years. She is the Founding Director for the Duke Endo Oncology Program, serves as the Associate Director for the Duke Cancer Therapy Toxicity Program, hosts and produces a medical podcast series, Checkpoint NOW and serves as the founding Chair of the Onco-Endocrinology Special interest Group through The Endocrine Society. She is also the Co-founder of Citrus Oncology, a virtual consultative platform for side effect management in cancer patients. Her research interests include optimizing healthcare through value-based, patient-centric clinical and educational programs targeted at improving access and reducing health costs while managing complex oncology patients effectively. She is a Principal Investigator for several studies including a study focused at creating a novel machine learning model to predict hospitalizations from immunotherapy-related adverse events up to 2 weeks before the expected event which was featured in the Science magazine. She is the recipient of the 2023 ACCC Innovator Award, has published in numerous peer-reviewed journals and speaks at several regional and national conferences. Timely access, patient-provider-subspecialist education, care navigation and predicting and preventing hospital admissions from toxicities using AI has been the focus of her career.