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John Blenis, PhD

Professor
Weill Cornell Medicine
New York, NY, United States

Dr. John Blenis is the Anna Maria and Stephen Kellen Professor of Cancer Research and Professor of Pharmacology at Weill Cornell Medicine and the Associate Director of Basic Science and Shared Resources at The Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center as well as the former director of the Pharmacology Ph.D. program. Dr. Blenis earned his B. A. from University of California, Berkeley and his Ph.D. from Michigan State University. His postdoctoral research in the Department of Cellular and Developmental Biology at Harvard University was immediately followed by an appointment as Assistant Professor at Northwestern University Medical School in 1987. In 1989, he joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School and remained there until moving to Weill Cornell Medicine in 2014.

Dr. Blenis has made pioneering contributions to our understanding of signal transduction. He discovered key components of the PI3K-mTOR-S6K, and Ras-ERK/MAPK pathways, arguably the most often altered signaling systems in cancer, set the conceptual framework for how they are organized and regulated, and identified therapeutic targets and inhibitors now being evaluated in clinical studies.

Dr. Blenis has received a number of awards including the ACS Junior Faculty award, AHA Established Investigator award, the Rothberg Courage Award, the LAM Foundation Established Investigator award, the NIH/NCI MERIT award and the Siegel Family Award for Outstanding Medical Research. Additionally, he has received two awards related to teaching and mentoring; The Academy at Harvard Medical School Excellence in Tutoring Award and Weill Cornell Medicine Pharmacology Outstanding Teaching & Mentoring Award.

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