Faculty Members Are Honored

Faculty Member and President Harold Varmus

The World Technology Network (WTN) awarded the 2005 WTN Award in Media and Journalism to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center President Harold Varmus and his colleagues at the Public Library of Science (PLoS). The WTN, "a global meeting ground and a virtual think tank," focuses on the business and science of emerging technologies.

PLoS is a nonprofit coalition of scientists dedicated to making scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. PLoS publishes several open access journals that can be found at www.plos.org.

Faculty Member Joan Massagué

Joan Massagué, Chairman of the Cancer Biology and Genetics Program, is among the recipients of the 2005 Mayor's Awards for Excellence in Science and Technology. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the winners of the awards in January, honoring the City's most outstanding scientists and engineers.

Dr. Massagué received the award in Biological and Medical Sciences. His research interest is in cell regulation and cancer -- specifically in the action of growth factors and the mechanisms of cancer metastasis.

Faculty Member Steven Larson

Steven M. Larson, Chief of the Nuclear Medicine Service in the Department of Radiology and a Member in the Molecular Pharmacology and Chemistry Program in the Sloan-Kettering Institute (SKI), has been elected a member of the Institute of Medicine (IOM). Dr. Larson is also co-leader of SKI's imaging and radiation sciences bridge program.

A leading physician-scientist, Dr. Larson is an innovator in the field of nuclear medicine. His clinical interests focus on the use of positron emission tomography (PET) for diagnostic and molecular imaging in the treatment of many different kinds of cancer. He also has expertise in the care and management of patients who are receiving targeted radiotherapy, particularly for thyroid cancer.

In the laboratory, Dr. Larson's work focuses on the experimental aspects of molecular imaging and targeted radiotherapy, including an important study published in 2004 that used PET to determine how the breast cancer drug 17-AAG functions on a cellular level in mouse models. He has also used advanced imaging techniques to elucidate the causes of fundamental setbacks in the successful treatment of cancer, such as disease progression and the development of multidrug resistance.

Dr. Larson earned his MD degree from the University of Washington School of Medicine. He completed a residency at Virginia Mason Hospital in Seattle and a fellowship at the National Institutes of Health.

The IOM is one of the four branches of the National Academies and was established to honor professional achievement in the health sciences and to serve as a national resource for recommendations on issues related to medicine, biomedical sciences, and health. Nine members of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center's staff already are IOM members.