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Bruce Stillman, Ph.D., President and Chief Executive Officer

photo of Bruce StillmanDr. Bruce Stillman is President and Chief Executive Officer of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and Oliver R. Grace Professor. A native of Australia, he obtained a Bachelor of Science degree with honors at The University of Sydney and a Ph.D. from the John Curtin School of Medical Research at the Australian National University. He then moved to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as a Postdoctoral Fellow in 1979 and has been at the Laboratory ever since, being promoted to the scientific staff in 1981. Dr. Stillman was Director of the Cancer Center at Cold Spring Harbor from 1992 – 2016. In 1994, he succeeded Nobel Laureate Dr. James D. Watson as Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and was appointed President in 2003.

Dr. Stillman’s research focuses on how chromosomes are duplicated in cells, a process that ensures accurate inheritance of genetic material from one generation to the next.

For his research accomplishments, Dr. Stillman has received a number of honors including election as a Fellow of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), as well as to The Royal Society, to the US National Academy of Sciences and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1994, Dr. Stillman was awarded the Julian Wells Medal (Australia) and in 1999 he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for service to scientific research in the field of molecular biology.  In 2004, Dr. Stillman and Dr. Thomas Kelly of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center were awarded the Alfred P. Sloan Prize by the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation.  In 2006 Dr. Stillman received the Basic Science award from the Society of Surgical Oncology. In 2010, Drs. Stillman and Kelly received the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University. He is the winner of the 2014 Herbert Tabor Research Award given by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. In 2019, he was awarded the Canada Gairdner International Award with John Diffley of The Francis Crick Institute. Dr. Stillman has received six honorary doctorates.

Dr. Stillman is a member of the Medical Advisory Board of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and advises a number of other research organizations, including the M.I.T. Cancer Center. He was chair of the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Cancer Institute and former vice-chair of the National Cancer Policy Board. He also served on the Board of Scientific Advisors of the National Cancer Institute.

Visit Dr. Stillman's Faculty Page