President Joe Biden has named a new doctor to lead the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest biomedical research agency that leads the United State’s public health efforts.

Dr. Monica Bertagnolli, a cancer surgeon who currently leads the NIH’s National Cancer Institute and announced last year she was diagnosed with breast cancer, is the president’s pick and will have her nomination go before the Senate.

“Dr. Bertagnolli has spent her career pioneering scientific discovery and pushing the boundaries of what is possible to improve cancer prevention and treatment for patients, and ensuring that patients in every community have access to quality care,” Biden said in a statement. “As Director of the National Cancer Institute, Dr. Bertagnolli has advanced my Cancer Moonshot to end cancer as we know it.”

Cancer is a particular focus of Biden’s, having lost his eldest son Beau to brain cancer in 2015. The president and First Lady Jill Biden both had lesions of the most common form of skin cancer removed earlier this year.

In President Barack Obama’s final State of the Union speech in 2016, he tasked Biden with a “cancer moonshot” to “make America the country that cures cancer one and for all.” Biden renewed those efforts in his 2022 State of the Union address with the goal of cutting “the cancer death rate by at least 50% over the next 25 years” by turning “more cancers from death sentences into treatable diseases.”

Bertagnolli’s career as an oncologist started as a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, became the chief of the surgical oncology division at the Dana-Farber Brigham Cancer Center, and later served as a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School. She was named the first woman to direct the National Cancer Institute last October and announced her own cancer diagnosis in December. 

“Having been an oncologist my entire career, it was always—and still is—all about the patients and survivors,” Bertagnolli said in a statement at the time. “It’s one thing to know about cancer as a physician, but it is another to experience it firsthand as a patient as well. To anyone with cancer today: I am truly in this together with you.”

Bertagnolli is Biden’s choice to replace Dr. Lawrence Tabak, who has served on an interim basis since December 2021 and was previously the agency’s principal deputy director since 2009. Tabak, whose background is in biochemical research and dentistry, replaced the NIH’s last permanent director Francis Collins, an Obama-appointed geneticist who served 12 years on the job.

The NIH is composed of 27 institutes and centers focused on different diseases and body parts, from cancer and diabetes to alcoholism and drug abuse to genetic research and child development. It had a mre than $46 billion budget in fiscal year 2023 and Biden is asking for $51.1 billion in the next budget.

Bertagnolli will be tasked with leading the agency’s broad research mandate while advancing the president’s cancer agenda, continuing to address the COVID-19 pandemic, and working to improve health in a country that one report from last year found has “the worst health outcomes overall of any high income nation.”

“Americans are more likely to die younger, and from avoidable causes, than residents of peer countries,” read the report from the Commonwealth Fund, a century-old independent research organization. “The U.S. has the lowest life expectancy at birth, the highest death rates for avoidable or treatable conditions, the highest maternal and infant mortality, and among the highest suicide rates.”

The report also found the U.S. spends much more per person and as a share of GDP than other wealthy countries, despite Americans seeing physicians less often.