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Vito Rebecca earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology and a Minor in Mathematics at Lafayette College (PA, USA) in 2009. He moved to the University of South Florida (FL, USA) where he earned a PhD in 2014 in Cancer Biology for work in proteomics and therapy resistance mechanisms utilized by BRAF wild type cutaneous melanomas, a patient cohort with no currently approved targeted therapies. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania (PA, USA) in 2017 on optimizing lysosomal inhibitors for the treatment of advanced cancers including colorectal and pancreatic. He next served as a Staff Scientist at The Wistar Institute until 2020 where he studied mechanisms of acquired resistance to combination BRAF and MEK inhibitor therapy in cutaneous melanomas by extensively using patient-derived xenograft (PDX) models. He joined the faculty of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2020 and leads a group focused on rare melanomas including acral lentiginous melanomas where new therapeutic approaches are urgently needed.