Staff

kelli beyer patel executive director

Kelli Beyer Patel

Executive Director

Kelli Beyer Patel is the Executive Director of The Happy Lungs Project, bringing more than 15 years of nonprofit leadership experience spanning cancer and rare disease advocacy, strategic partnerships, fundraising, patient engagement, and organizational growth.

Prior to joining HLP, Kelli served as Strategic Director of Industry Partnerships at the American Cancer Society (ACS), where she led complex, cross-functional collaborations with some of the world’s largest healthcare companies. Her work included activating the largest corporate partnership in ACS’s history, an ambitious effort designed to reach communities facing disproportionate cancer burdens through trusted messengers and culturally relevant engagement. With more than one billion impressions, the initiative sought to move people from awareness to action, helping more individuals take meaningful steps to prevent and detect cancer early and improve their chances of surviving it.

Earlier in her career, Kelli helped lead significant growth across organizations working in rare disease, STEM education, and family homelessness in the nation’s capital. As Director of Education and Outreach for the Foundation for Sarcoidosis Research, she helped grow the organization from a small patient advocacy nonprofit into an internationally recognized rare disease organization. She built and expanded national patient engagement and education programs, launched and scaled a Patient Ambassador Program to nearly every state, facilitated a Congressional briefing on Capitol Hill, increased patient registry participation by more than 160%, and helped secure a transformational $3 million philanthropic investment that accelerated the organization’s growth and impact.

Kelli’s commitment to cancer and patient advocacy is deeply personal. She lost her mother to triple-negative breast cancer and her father to prostate cancer, which shaped her belief that patients deserve to be active partners in the research, care, and decisions that affect their lives.

Kelli lives in Philadelphia with her husband, Bhavik, their endlessly entertaining and loving toddler, and two dogs, Kevin and Finley, who remain firmly convinced they are also human members of the family.

irene munoz director of reserarch happy lungs project RET lung cancer

Irene Guijarro Munoz

Director of Research

Irene Guijarro Munoz joined the Happy Lungs Project (HLP) as Director of Research in 2022.

She oversees and coordinates the RET research program at HLP, including the studies that are currently being funded by HLP and conducted at four major US cancer centers. She assists with the development of RET research funding proposals and coordinates collaborations between the academic investigators and commercial contractors. In addition, she helps lung cancer patients and their families in the understanding of the RET positive lung cancer biology and the potential treatment options available.

She has a scientific background and she completed a PhD in Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Biomedicine, a Master of Biotechnology, and a Bachelor’s Degree in Biochemistry at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain, where she is originally from. 

She worked in lung cancer research as a postdoctoral fellow at Dr. John Heymach’s laboratory at Thoracic/Head and Neck Medical Oncology, MD Anderson Cancer Center. In 2018, she started a new position as Research Project Manager at Thoracic/Head and Neck Medical Oncology where she assisted with the development of multiple grant submissions and research proposals, oversaw the progress of the projects carrying out in the lab and progress report submissions, and assisted with the critical review of abstracts, presentation, etc.

Learn more about Irene.