Stephen C. Blacklow, MD, PhD

Stephen C. Blacklow, MD, PhD is the Gustavus Adolphus Pfeiffer Professor and Chair of the Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School, and a member of the Department of Cancer Biology at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

Research by Dr. Blacklow’s team has advanced understanding of how signaling between different cells induces growth and changes in cell identity both in normal development and in cancer. His research on the Notch pathway has led to the development of new investigational therapies for hematologic malignancies such as T cell acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL).

Of his many awards and professional affiliations, Stephen received the National Cancer Institute’s prestigious Outstanding Investigator Award in 2017 and was elected to the Association of American Physicians in 2018. Stephen also directed the MD-PhD Program in Basic and Translational Sciences at Harvard Medical School and has served on Advisory Committees for pre-clinical departments, graduate programs, and MD-PhD programs at several major research universities and institutions, including Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Stephen earned his M.D. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1991. He completed his residency in Clinical Pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and conducted his postdoctoral research at the Whitehead Institute with Dr. Peter S. Kim. 

Christopher D. Lima, PhD

Christopher D. Lima, PhD is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at the Sloan Kettering Institute in New York City where he is Chair and Member of the Structural Biology Program. He holds an Alfred P. Sloan endowed chair and is a Professor in the Weill Cornell and Sloan Kettering Graduate Schools. He received his PhD from Northwestern University for resolving the structure of DNA topoisomerase I. As a Helen Hay Whitney Fellow at Columbia University, his postdoctoral studies focused on resolving mechanisms underlying nucleotidyl transferases. He joined the faculty at Weill Cornell in 1998 and moved his lab to Sloan Kettering in 2003. His research investigates pathways that contribute to RNA processing and post-translational modification by ubiquitin-like proteins. He was a Beckman Young Investigator and Rita Allen Scholar and was selected as an HHMI Investigator in 2013. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2020