Dr. William G. Kaelin, Jr., is a professor at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, MA. He received his medical degree from Duke University in 1982 and was a house officer in internal medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He went on to become a medical oncology clinical fellow at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. David Livingston, where he began his studies of tumor suppressor proteins. He became an independent investigator at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in 1992 as a James S. McDonnell Scholar and became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator in 1998. Dr. Kaelin is also a professor in the Department of Medicine at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Senior Physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and associate director for basic research at the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center.
Dr. Kaelin’s research interests have focused on tumor suppressor genes and the normal functions of the proteins they encode. The long-term goal of his work is to lay the foundation for the development of new anticancer therapies based on the functions of specific tumor suppressor proteins. His studies of tumor suppressor genes linked to hereditary forms of cancer have uncovered molecular pathways that are important in non-hereditary cancers and have accelerated the development of new treatments for kidney cancer.
Dr. Kaelin is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine and has served on numerous boards and committees, including the American Association for Cancer Research’s Board of Directors and the NCI Board of Scientific Advisors. He has received many awards for his work, including the AACR-Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Prize for Cancer Research and the Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer.