Dr. Harold Varmus has served as the President and Chief Executive Officer of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City Since January 2000. He is also the Chief Executive Officer of the Ralph Lauren Center for Cancer Care and Prevention since its inception in May 2003. Dr. Varmus is the former Director of the National Institutes of Health and co-recipient of a Nobel Prize for studies of the genetic basis of cancer.

Dr. Varmus has authored over 300 scientific papers and four books, including an introduction to the genetic basis of cancer for a general audience, and he has been an advisor to the Federal government, pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms, and many academic institutions. He served on the World Health Organization’s Commission on Macroeconomics and Health from 2000 to 2002; is a co-founder and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Public Library of Science, a publisher of open access journals in the biomedical sciences; chairs the Scientific Board of the Grand Challenges in Global Health at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; and is involved in initiatives to promote science in developing countries, including the Global Science Corps, through the Science Initiatives Group,. He has been a member of the US National Academy of Sciences since 1984 and of the Institute of Medicine since 1991, and has received the National Medal of Science, the Vannevar Bush Award, and several honorary degrees and other prizes, in addition to the Nobel Prize.

Dr. Varmus majored in English literature at Amherst College and earned a master’s degree in English at Harvard University. He is a graduate of Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, worked as a medical student in a hospital in India, and served on the medical house staff at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. His scientific training occurred first as a Public Health Service officer at the NIH, where he studied bacterial gene expression with Dr. Ira Pastan, and then as a post-doctoral fellow with Dr. Bishop at the University of California, San Francisco.

In September 2008 Dr. Varmus was selected as one of co-chairs of the Council of Advisors on Science and Technology to serve in the Obama administration.