Michael B. Kastan, MD, PhD is executive director of the Duke Cancer Institute and professor of Pharmacology, Cancer Biology and Pediatrics at the Duke University School of Medicine. He earned his MD and PhD degrees from the Washington University School of Medicine and attended Johns Hopkins for his clinical training in pediatrics and pediatric hematology-oncology. Dr. Kastan was a professor of Oncology, Pediatrics and Molecular Biology at Johns Hopkins before he became chair of the Hematology-Oncology Department and director of the Cancer Center at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, before moving to Duke. He is a pediatric oncologist and a cancer biologist whose laboratory research is focused on DNA damage and repair, tumor suppressor genes, and causes of cancer related to genetic predisposition and environmental exposures.

Dr. Kastan’s discoveries have made a major impact on understanding of how cancers develop and respond to chemotherapy and radiation therapy. 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. Dr. Kastan has received numerous honors including election to the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine. He received the 47th annual American Association for Cancer Research G.H.A. Clowes Memorial Award for outstanding contributions to basic cancer research. Dr. Kastan has served as chairman of the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Cancer Institute and as a member of the Board of Directors of the American Association for Cancer Research. He is co-author of Abeloff’s Clinical Oncology, 4th Edition.

Related Authors: James O. Armitage, MD; John E. Niederhuber, MD; W. Gillies McKenna, MD, PhD