Table of Contents

Rakesh Jain - Harvard

February 21, 2012
15:00 DKFZ Main Auditorium
Host: Frank Winkler


Biosketch Rakesh Jain

Rakesh K. Jain, PhD, is the Andrew Werk Cook Professor of Tumor Biology (Radiation Oncology) at Harvard Medical School, and the Director of the Edwin L. Steele Laboratory of Tumor Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center.  Prior to joining Harvard in 1991, he served as assistant professor of chemical engineering at Columbia University (1976-78), and as assistant (1978-79), associate (1979-83) and full professor (1983-91) of chemical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.

Dr. Jain is regarded as a pioneer in the fields of tumor biology, drug delivery, in vivo imaging, bioengineering, and bench-to-bedside translation.  He is known for uncovering the vascular, interstitial and cellular barriers to the delivery and efficacy of molecular and nano-medicine in tumors; for developing and testing new principles to overcome these barriers for improving treatment of cancer and non-cancerous diseases; and then translating these principles from bench to bedside, and in the process discovering new biomarkers and new strategies to improve the outcome further.  His work has fundamentally changed the thinking of scientists and clinicians about how molecularly targeted therapeutics, especially antiangiogenic agents, work in animal models and cancer patients, and how to combine them optimally with cytotoxic therapies to improve survival rates in patients.

Dr. Jain’s capacity to integrate principles from engineering, mathematics, physiology, biology and oncology along with his ability to productively collaborate with physician-scientists are central to his uniquely, multidisciplinary approach of bench-to-bedside-and-back research.  Trained as a chemical engineer, he has developed the world’s leading laboratory for the quantitative study of tumor microenvironment and the role of physical forces in tumor progression and treatment response.  He has been most generous in sharing his innovative technology and creatively designed model systems, which has truly enabled much of the progress in this field worldwide.

A mentor to more than 200 doctoral and postdoctoral students from over a dozen different disciplines, and a collaborator of a similar number of clinicians and scientists worldwide, Dr. Jain’s findings are summarized in more than 535 publications, including three in Scientific American (ISI citations > 45,000; h-index = 103 as of 12/1/2011).  He has served on advisory panels to government, industry and academia, and a member of editorial boards of ten journals, including Nature Reviews Cancer, Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology, Cancer Research, and Journal of Clinical Oncology.  He received more than 50 awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1983-1984), the Humboldt Senior Scientist Award (1990-1991), the National Cancer Institute’s Research Career Development Award (1980-1985) and Outstanding Investigator Grant (1993-2000), the Academic Scientist of the Year Award from the Pharmaceutical Achievements Awards (2005) and the Department of Defense-Breast Cancer Research Innovator Award (2010-2015).  He is a member of all three US National Academies - the Institute of Medicine, the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences - and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

(Further details at URL http://steele.mgh.harvard.edu.)