Michael B. Kastan, MD, PhD

He is the William and Jane Shingleton Professor of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology and Professor of Pediatrics at Duke University and serves as the Executive Director of the Duke Cancer Institute.

He earned M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the Washington University School of Medicine and did his clinical training in Pediatrics and Pediatric Hematology-Oncology at Johns Hopkins. He was a Professor of Oncology, Pediatrics, and Molecular Biology at Johns Hopkins prior to becoming Chair of the Hematology-Oncology Department and later Cancer Center Director at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, before moving to Duke in 2011.

He is a Pediatric Oncologist and a cancer biologist; his laboratory research concentrates on DNA damage and repair, tumor suppressor genes, and causes of cancer related to genetic predisposition and environmental exposures. His discoveries have made a major impact on our understanding of both how cancers develop and how they respond to chemotherapy and radiation therapy, with many highly cited publications reporting the roles of p53 and ATM in DNA damage signaling.

He has received numerous honors for his impactful work, including election to the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and receiving the AACR-G.H.A. Clowes Memorial Award for outstanding contributions to basic cancer research. He has served as Chair of the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), on the Boards of Directors of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) and the American Association of Cancer Institutes (AACI), as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Molecular Cancer Research, and as Editor of the textbook Clinical Oncology. He also serves on the scientific advisory boards of Stand-Up-to-Cancer (SU2C), the V Foundation, and numerous NCI-designated Cancer Centers.