ASSOCIATED FACULTY

Benjamin L. Ebert, MD, PhD, is President and CEO of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Director of Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, and the Richard and Susan Smith Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

His work focuses on the molecular basis and treatment of hematologic malignancies and its non-malignant precursor conditions, with a particular focus on myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) and clonal hematopoiesis. The Ebert laboratory demonstrated that lenalidomide, a derivative of thalidomide, binds the CRL4-CRBN E3 ubiquitin ligase and induces degradation of specific substrates. Subsequent research has examined novel mechanisms of drug-induced protein degradation that expand the spectrum of protein substrates that can be targeted pharmacologically.

Rafael Irizarry, PhD, is a Professor and Chair of Data Science at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and a Professor of Biostatistics at Harvard. He earned his Ph.D. in Statistics from UC Berkeley in 1998 and has made major contributions to genomics, developing widely used statistical methods and software through the Bioconductor Project.

His research spans genomics, infectious diseases, public health, and more. A leader in data science education, he has created popular online courses completed by tens of thousands of learners. He has received numerous honors, including the COPSS Presidents’ Award and the Benjamin Franklin Award in the Life Sciences.

Cheng-Zhong Zhang, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School and at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He combines single-cell genomic analysis and cell biology to study genome evolution and phenotypic variation. Currently, he focuses on the mechanisms and the transcriptional consequences of chromosomal abnormalities, such as rearrangement and aneuploidy, and how such events may promote tumor development.