Craig B. Thompson, MD, became President and Chief Executive Officer of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center — the world’s oldest and largest private institution devoted to cancer prevention, treatment, research, and education — in November 2010.
Previously, Dr. Thompson was affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania. He joined the university in 1999 as a professor of medicine, Scientific Director of the Leonard and Madlyn Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute, and the first Chairman of the Department of Cancer Biology. In 2006 he was named Director of the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania and Associate Vice President for Cancer Services of the University of Pennsylvania Health System.
Dr. Thompson received his bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College and went on to earn his medical degree in 1977 from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. He received clinical training in internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and in medical oncology at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Institute at the University of Washington. After completing his training, Dr. Thompson became a physician at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and an assistant professor of medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. In 1987, he joined the faculty of the University of Michigan as an assistant professor of medicine and an assistant investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). From 1993 until he joined the University of Pennsylvania, he was affiliated with the University of Chicago, where he was professor of medicine, an HHMI investigator, and Director of the Gwen Knapp Center for Lupus and Immunology Research.
Dr. Thompson is a member of the Medical Advisory Board of HHMI, a member of the Lasker Prize jury, and Associate Editor of the journals Cell, Cell Metabolism, Cancer Discovery, and Cancer Cell. He holds a number of patents related to immunotherapy and apoptosis and is a founder of three biotechnology companies. He sits on the Scientific Advisory Board of Agios Pharmaceuticals and formerly served on the Board of Directors of Merck and Charles River Laboratories. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Society for Clinical Investigation, and the Association of American Physicians.
To date, Dr. Thompson has published more than 430 peer-reviewed manuscripts and more than 100 reviews. His laboratory undertakes basic research in the fields of cell biology and immunology. This research has recently contributed to the resurgent interest in cancer cell metabolism and may form the basis for translational therapies to exploit the metabolic addictions exhibited by cancer cells.
