Carol Prives is the DaCosta Professor of Biological Sciences at Columbia University. She was educated in Canada, receiving her BSc and PhD from McGill University. After postdoctoral training at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the Weizmann Institute, she became a faculty member at the Weizmann, after which she joined the Biological Sciences Department at Columbia University where she was appointed to a named professorship in 1995. Dr. Prives served as Chair of that department between 2000 and 2004. Since the late 1980’s her work has focused on the p53 tumor suppressor protein, the product of the most frequently mutated gene in human cancers. Her work has focused on the structure and functional analysis of the p53 protein especially as it relates to its roles as a transcriptional activator. Similarly she has examined how cancer related mutant forms of p53 regulate tumorigenesis. Work from her group has also illuminated the functions of the p53 negative regulators, Mdm2 and MdmX.
Dr. Prives has served as Chair of both the Experimental Virology and the Cell and Molecular Pathology Study Sections of the NIH and was a member of the NCI Intramural Scientific Advisory Board. She was also a member of the Advisory Boards of the Dana-Farber Cancer Center, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and the Massachusetts General Cancer Center as well as the American Association for Cancer Research. Dr. Prives has received several honors including being named an American Cancer Society Research Professor, election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences. She has received awards and lectureships including the NCI Rosalind E Franklin Award for Women in Science and the AACR-Women in Cancer Research Charlotte Friend Memorial Lectureship Award. Most recently she was awarded an honorary doctorate from McGill University, her alma mater.