Michael B. Kastan, M.D., Ph.D., is the executive director of the Duke Cancer Institute. He earned medical and doctoral 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 earlier this year. 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 and his publications reporting the role of p53 and ATM in DNA damage signaling are among the most highly cited publications in the biomedical literature of the past two decades. He has received numerous honors for his highly cited work, including election to the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine and receiving the 47th annual AACR-G.H.A. Clowes Memorial Award for outstanding contributions to basic cancer research. He has served as chairman of the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Cancer Institute and on the Board of Directors of the American Association for Cancer Research. He is currently editor-in-chief of the journal Molecular Cancer Research and editor of the textbook Clinical Oncology.