William Kaelin Jr.
Dr. Kaelin is the Sidney Farber Professor of Medicine in the Department of Medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. He obtained his undergraduate and MD degrees from Duke University and completed his training in internal medicine at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he served as chief medical resident. He was a clinical fellow in Medical Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, during which time he was a McDonnell Scholar.
Dr. Kaelin is a member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation and the Institute of Medicine (IOM). He recently served on the National Cancer Institute Board of Scientific Advisors, the AACR Board of Trustees, and the IOM National Cancer Policy Board. He is a recipient of the Paul Marks Prize for cancer research from the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Prize from the AACR. In April 2010, Dr. Kaelin was named one of five recipients of the prestigious Canada Gairdner International Award, and he also was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. In 2016, Dr. Kaelin won the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award. In 2019, Dr. Kaelin was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine with Sir Peter J. Ratcliffe of Oxford University and the Francis Crick Institute, and Gregg L. Semenza of Johns Hopkins University. In 2024, Dr. Kaelin was elected as a Member of the American Philosophical Society.
A Howard Hughes Medical Investigator since 1998, Dr. Kaelin’s research seeks to understand how, mechanistically, mutations affecting tumor-suppressor genes cause cancer. His long-term goal is to lay the foundation for new anticancer therapies based on the biochemical functions of tumor suppressor proteins. His work on the VHL protein helped to motivate the eventual successful clinical testing of VEGF inhibitors and the first HIF2 Inhibitor for the treatment of kidney cancer. Moreover, this line of investigation led to new insights into how cells sense and respond to changes in oxygen, and thus has implications for diseases beyond cancer, such as anemia, myocardial infarction and stroke.
