Knudsen is the first woman CEO to lead the 109-year-old organization. She is also the first basic scientist and the first director of a cancer center to hold this job. Before moving to ACS, she was the executive vice president of Oncology Services and enterprise director for Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson Health. She continues to serve on the NCI Board of Scientific Advisors.

In a recent interview, Knudsen said she has redesigned the society to follow a four-pillar blueprint.

“We are now organized into those units that we talked about last year: Advocacy, Patient Support, and Discovery,” Knudsen said to The Cancer Letter. She started the reorganization on Day One of the job (The Cancer Letter, Sept. 3, 2021) .

“Those units each have a component of the strategic plan that they own, and all of it laying on the foundation of our commitment to health equity. So, every component of our strategic plan, irrespective of the pillar, is aligned to reducing a particular cancer disparity, and our overall goal to enhance cancer equity and health equity,” Knudsen said.

The fourth pillar on Knudsen blueprint—Development—is about money.

In an interview, Knudsen refrained from citing actual numbers, but said that fundraising is up. More information will be released in the next few weeks, after the meeting of the audit committee of the board.

Total public support for ACS has been sliding every year since 2007, with an especially steep drop—caused primarily by COVID—occurring in 2019 and 2020.

“We beat our plan by about 30% last year. We’re having a really good year this year, but the most important part about that is that the dollars are going back out the door,” Knudsen said. “We’re putting more dollars into mission than have happened in the last many years. And in terms of what we were able to do last year, we realized toward the end of the year, when we were doing very well, we had more dollars that we could put out into mission. So, we did.

“We, again, thought deeply as an executive team: ‘All right, if we’ve got more money to go out the door, what is the highest and best use of funds? What’s the thing that right now is really going to help a patient or family?’ And because of the pandemic, and because so many individuals were behind on either cancer care or cancer screening, those dollars largely went into patient transportation and lodging toward the end of the year, so that we could get more patients to care. And it was across the country.

“I hope we have the same problem this year, that at the end of the year, we’re able to say, ‘Okay, what can we do for Advocacy, Discovery, and for Patient Support at the end of the year that’s above and beyond what we had been able to plan?’”