Dr. Stephen Blacklow 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.
Stephen received his undergraduate degree from Harvard College in 1983 and 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 where he investigated the structure of the HIV envelope glycoprotein. Stephen then joined the faculty at Stanford before returning to Harvard Medical School in 1998 as an Assistant Professor of Pathology at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He became a Professor of Pathology in 2009 and directed the MD-PhD Program in Basic and Translational Sciences at Harvard Medical School from 2007-2012 until he was appointed to his current position. His research has focused on how cells communicate with one another to transmit signals across membranes and induce responses that influence cell fate decisions in both normal and pathogenic states such as cancer. His research on the Notch pathway has stimulated development of investigational therapies for hematologic malignancies such as T cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Stephen received the National Cancer Institute’s prestigious Outstanding Investigator Award in 2017 and was elected to the Association of American Physicians in 2018.