Lewis Cantley

Lewis Cantley, Ph.D., has made significant advances in cancer research stemming from his discovery of the signaling pathway phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) in 1984. The author of more than 400 original papers, 50 book chapters and review articles, Dr. Cantley is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Science, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, and the European life sciences academy EMBO. He graduated summa cum laude with a B.S. in chemistry from West Virginia Wesleyan College (1971) and obtained a Ph.D. in biophysical chemistry from Cornell University (1975). He conducted postdoctoral research at Harvard University, where he was appointed assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology in 1978. He became a professor of physiology at Tufts University in 1985, but returned to Harvard Medical School as professor of cell biology in 1992. He became chief of Harvard’s new Division of Signal Transduction, and a founding member of its Department of Systems Biology in 2002. In 2007, he was appointed director of the Beth Israel Deaconess Cancer Center. He joined Weill Cornell Medicine as the Meyer Director of the Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center in 2012. Among his accolades are the ASBMB Avanti Award for Lipid Research (1998); the Heinrich Wieland Preis for Lipid Research (2000); the Caledonian Prize from the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2002); the Pezcoller Foundation–AACR International Award for Cancer Research (2005); the Rolf Luft Award for Diabetes and Endocrinology Research from the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm (2009); the Pasarow Prize for Cancer Research (2011); the Breakthrough in Life Sciences Prize (2013); the Jacobaeus Prize for Diabetes Research from the Karolinska Institute (2013); the AACR Princess Takamatsu Memorial Lectureship (2015); the Ross Prize in Molecular Medicine (2015); the Canada Gairdner International Award (2015); the AACI Distinguished Scientist Award (2015); the Hope Funds Award of Excellence in Basic Science (2016); the Wolf Prize (2016); and the NCI Outstanding Investigator Award (2016).