Research and Development Advisory Board
Dr. Levine is a Professor at The Cancer Institute of New Jersey, Robert Wood Johnson School of Medicine; a Visiting Professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Center for Systems Biology; and former President, Rockefeller University. Before joining Rockefeller University in 1998, he was the Harry C. Weiss Professor of Life Sciences at Princeton University, where he founded the University's Molecular Biology Department and guided it through 12 years of dramatic growth. Prior to his work at Princeton, Dr. Levine was chairman of the Molecular Biology Department at SUNY/Stony Brook School of Medicine. Among his many accomplishments is the discovery of a protein molecule that inhibits the development of cancer tumors. Dr. Levine holds a PhD in microbiology from the University of Pennsylvania and conducted post-doctoral work in virology at the California Institute of Technology. He is presently a member of the Board of Directors of the Applera Corporation and Infinity Pharmaceuticals Jeffrey Friedman, MD, PhD Dr. Friedman is the Marilyn M. Simpson Professor and Director of the Starr Center for Human Genetics at Rockefeller University and an Investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His research on the molecular mechanisms that regulate body weight and metabolism received national attention in 1994, when Dr. Friedman and his colleagues isolated the mouse ob gene, or fat gene, and its human homologue. His group subsequently showed that leptin, the protein encoded by the ob gene, decreases body weight of mice by reducing food intake and increasing energy expenditure. Dr. Friedman received his BS and MD degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute - Albany Medical College. After completing a residency in internal medicine at Albany Medical College and entering a gastroenterology fellowship at Cornell University Medical College, he enrolled in the graduate program at Rockefeller, where he received his PhD in molecular biology. Dr. Friedman is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Among his honors is the 2001 Bristol-Myers Squibb Award for distinguished achievement in metabolic research. Victor Dzau, MD Dr. Dzau is the Chancellor for Health Affairs at Duke University and president and chief executive officer of the Duke University Health System. Dr. Dzau was formerly Hersey Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and chairman of the Department of Medicine, physician-in-chief and director of research at the Brigham and Women's Hospital. At Harvard, he sat on numerous committees and advisory boards, including the Executive Committee of The Academy at Harvard Medical School and the board of Brigham and Women's Hospital. He has been elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Science (USA) and the European Academy of Science and Arts. Previous Chairman of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Cardiovascular Disease Advisory Committee, he has served on the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Institutes of Health. In 1999, he became Editor-in-Chief for Physiological Genomics. A founding member of the Society of Vascular Medicine and Biology, Dr. Dzau was Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Vascular Medicine and Biology. After receiving his MD from McGill University in Montreal, Dr. Dzau did his postgraduate training at Harvard Medical School. Jeffrey S. Flier, PhD Dr. Jeffrey S. Flier is the George C. Reisman Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Vice Chair of Research of the Department of Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC). He is an authority on the genetic and metabolic basis of obesity in mouse models. Dr. Flier is a former Division Chief of Endocrinology at BIDMC. Dr. Flier's research has produced major insights into the molecular mechanism of insulin action, the molecular mechanisms of insulin resistance in human disease and the molecular pathophysiology of obesity. He has authored over 200 scholarly papers and reviews and has held many editorial positions, including Associate Editor of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, and has served on the Editorial Boards of Molecular Endocrinology, the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, and the American Journal of Medicine. Dr. Flier is currently on the Board of Consulting Editors of Science Magazine. Dr. Flier has received numerous honors and awards. He is a graduate of the City College of New York and Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Donald E. Ingber, MD,PhD Dr. Ingber, MD, PhD is the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology in the Department of Pathology at Harvard Medical School, and Departments of Pathology and Surgery at Children's Hospital Boston. He is also a member of the Vascular Biology Program at Children's Hospital, the Materials Research Science and the Engineering Center at Harvard, the Harvard-MIT Health Science and Technology Division, the MIT Center for Bioengineering, and the Harvard-Dana Farber Cancer Center. Dr. Ingber's theoretical and experimental contributions have led to honors in medical science, anatomy, developmental biology, mechanical engineering, and theoretical mechanics from leading institutions including Mayo Clinic, Stanford, and MIT, as well as recognition by NASA and the American Cancer Society. Dr. Ingber is a member of the NIH/NSF Committee on NanoBioTechnology, and of the Space Studies Board of the National Research Council and National Academies of Science and Engineering, as well as the chairman of its committee on Space Biology and Medicine. Dr. Ingber is also currently the Director of the Center for Integration in Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT) at Children's Hospital. He received his BA, MA, MPh, MD, and PhD degrees from Yale University before moving to Harvard in 1984. Since that time, he has authored over 200 publications and more than 20 patents in areas ranging from anti-angiogenic therapeutics, tissue engineering, medical devices, and nanotechnology to computer software. Marc Kirschner, PhD Dr. Kirschner is founding chair of the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has served on the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Institutes of Health and as President of the American Society for Cell Biology. Dr. Kirschner's laboratory investigates three broad, diverse areas: regulation of the cell cycle, the role of cytoskeleton in cell morphogenesis, and mechanisms of establishing the basic vertebrate body plan. In 1993, Dr. Kirschner arrived at Harvard Medical School and served as the founding chair of the Department of Cell Biology until September 2003. Before coming to Boston, he was Professor for fifteen years at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Kirschner graduated from Northwestern University in 1966 and received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1971. Following postdoctoral research at Berkeley and at the University of Oxford, he was appointed an Assistant Professor at Princeton University in 1972. Douglas Lauffenburger, PhD Dr. Lauffenburger is Uncas & Helen Whitaker Professor of Bioengineering in the Biological Engineering [BE] Division, Biology Department, and Chemical Engineering Department, and is a Member of the Center for Cancer Research, Center for Biomedical Engineering, and Biotechnology Process Engineering Center at MIT. He serves as Director of the BE Division and on the Executive Committee of the MIT Computational & Systems Biology Initiative. Dr. Lauffenburger's PhD is in chemical engineering from the University of Minnesota. His major research interests are in receptor-mediated cell communication and intracellular signal transduction for cell cue/signal/response relationships important in pathophysiology with application to drug discovery and development. Professor Lauffenburger has served as a consultant or scientific advisory board member for numerous pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and has served as President of the Biomedical Engineering Society and on the Advisory Council for the National Institute for General Medical Sciences at the NIH. Chris Sander, PhD Dr. Sander is Head of the Computational Biology Center at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and tri-institutional professor at Rockefeller and Cornell Universities. He is internationally acknowledged as a founder of computational biology, an emerging discipline that aims to solve important problems in biology using techniques of mathematics, physics, engineering, and computer science. His principal research interests are in computational and systems biology, including predictive simulations of biological processes, integrated molecular profiling of disease states, gene regulation by small RNAs and structural genomics. He is a leader in community efforts to create an open-source information resource for biological pathways. Previously, Dr. Sander served as Chief Information Science Officer with Millennium Pharmaceuticals, as Senior Scientist at the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge, England, as founding chair of the department of Biocomputing at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg. He is editor of Bioinformatics, a leading journal in computational biology, and currently an advisor to the Protein Structure Initiative of the National Institutes of Health and the IBM Deep Computing Initiative. Dr. Sander was trained at the universities of Berlin, Berkeley, Copenhagen and Stony Brook and his PhD is in theoretical physics. Bennett M. Shapiro, MD Dr. Shapiro served as an Executive Vice President at Merck from 1990 to 2003. He was most recently Executive Vice President, Worldwide Licensing and External Research. Prior, he served as the head of basic and preclinical research at Merck and as Professor and Chairman of the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Washington. Dr. Shapiro has authored over 120 scientific publications in biochemistry and molecular cell biology, and has served on numerous institutional advisory boards and scientific review panels. Dr. Shapiro received his bachelor's degree from Dickinson College and his MD from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. Jan van der Greef, PhD Dr. Jan van der Greef is Scientific Director of Systems Biology Research, Life Sciences, at Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) in the Netherlands. He is also Professor of Analytical Biosciences and co-founder of the Center for Medical Systems Biology at Leiden University at the Leiden/Amsterdam Center for Drug Research. Dr. van der Greef's current research interest is the development of systems biology, including novel proteomics technologies, metabolomics fingerprinting, and biostatistics, applied to the characterization of complex biological systems. Previously, as managing director of TNO Pharma from 1995 to 2003, he successfully developed an innovative business organization for pre-clinical and clinical development. Dr. van der Greef is also co-founder of Kiadis, focusing on high resolution screening platforms for natural products and orphan targets. His PhD was completed at the University of Amsterdam in the field of mass spectrometry. He is considered a pioneer in the field of liquid chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry (LCMS), body fluid profiling and pattern recognition, and among the first to develop single cell profiling by mass spectrometry. |