Faculty Member Joan Massagué

Joan Massagué, Chair of the Cancer Biology and Genetics Program in the Sloan-Kettering Institute, has been named the recipient of two prestigious awards. The first is the G.H.A. Clowes Memorial Award, presented by the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), and the second is the Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Biomedicine, presented by the BBVA Foundation.

The G.H.A. Clowes Award was established in 1961 by the AACR and Eli Lilly and Company to honor Dr. Clowes, a founding member of the AACR and a research director of Eli Lilly. The award recognizes outstanding recent accomplishments in basic cancer research. As recipient, Dr. Massagué gave a lecture during the AACR Annual Meeting in Denver in April. He will also speak at Eli Lilly headquarters later in 2009.

The Frontiers of Knowledge Awards seek to encourage world-class research in a variety of scientific subjects and the arts on an international level. They are given annually by the BBVA Foundation, which is based in Dr. Massagué's native Spain, and organized in partnership with Spain's National Research Council.

"I am honored, humbled, and baffled to receive these awards -- the Clowes Award for such an illustrious list of prior recipients, and the Frontiers Prize for being included among international scholars in so many different disciplines," Dr. Massagué said.

Dr. Massagué is a leader in the study of both cancer metastasis and growth factors that regulate cell behavior. He is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine, and the incumbent of an Alfred P. Sloan Chair at Memorial Sloan-Kettering. He earned his PhD from the University of Barcelona and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University. He joined Memorial Sloan-Kettering in 1989 as Chair of Sloan-Kettering Institute's Cell Biology Program and was named inaugural Chair of the Cancer Biology and Genetics Program in 2003. In December 2008, he also was honored with the inaugural AACR Distinguished Leadership Award in Breast Cancer Research.