Education

• MD Degree from University of Medicine and Pharmacy “Iuliu Hatieganu”, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
• Residency in Internal Medicine and Chief Residency at William Beaumont Hospital, Royal Oak, MI
• Fellowship in Hematology-Oncology at Mayo Clinic Rochester MN
• Mayo Clinic Foundation Scholar
• CTSA KL2 Mentored Career Development Program Scholar, Mayo Clinic Rochester MN
• Currently Senior Associate Consultant and Assistant Professor of Oncology at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN

Personal

Dr. Dronca and her husband Serban are both from the beautiful and historical Romanian province, Transylvania.

Research Focus

Dr. Dronca’s clinical and research interests are in the field of tumor immunology, with a particular interest in malignant melanoma and genitourinary malignancies. Her goal is to develop innovative approaches to cancer therapy utilizing chemotherapy and immunotherapy agents administered in an individualized fashion, synchronized to patient-specific endogenous anti-tumor immune dynamics. Dr. Dronca’s close collaboration with the Melanoma Group and Dr. Svetomir Markovic’s laboratory at Mayo Clinic led to the observation that advanced melanoma patients have a dynamic Th2 biased immuno environment that hampers the efficacy of tumor immunotherapy. She was awarded a three-year KL2 Mentored Career Development Program Award via the Center for Clinical and Translational Science Activities at Mayo Clinic for her project on the bioperiodicity of immune response in metastatic melanoma. Her research focus is to study the signaling pathway of B7-H1/PD-1 and its role in impaired host immunity in melanoma patients.