Tyler Jacks is a cancer geneticist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), an Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, and director of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.
Professor Jacks received his bachelor's degree in biology from Harvard College, and his doctorate from the University of California, San Francisco, where he trained with Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus. He was a postdoctoral fellow with Robert Weinberg at the Whitehead Institute before he joined the MIT faculty in 1992.
The Jacks laboratory is interested in the genetic events contributing to the development of cancer. He is well known for his work on the development of genetically engineered mouse models of cancer (GEMMs). By combining these pre-clinical models with cutting-edge tools in genetics and genomics, the Jacks lab has been able to illuminate the pathways and processes critical for cancer progression.
Professor Jacks HAS received the AACR Outstanding Achievement Award, the Amgen Award from the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, the Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research, and the Sergio Lombroso Award in Cancer Research. He also served as Chair of the National Cancer Advisory Board at the National Cancer Institute, was a member of the Board of Directors of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), and was elected President of the AACR in 2009.
