Dr Bruce StillmanPresident, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, USA

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Dr. Bruce Stillman is President of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which he has held since 2003. A native of Australia, he graduated B.Sc.(Hons) at The University of Sydney and Ph.D. at the John Curtin School of Medical Research, Australian National University. He then moved to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) as a Postdoctoral Fellow in 1979. Dr. Stillman is Director of the Cancer Center at CSHL, a position he has held since 1992. In 1994, he succeeded Nobel Laureate Dr. James D. Watson as Director of CSHL.

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.

Dr. Stillman has received a number of honors including election as a Fellow of The Royal Society; to the US National Academy of Sciences, and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and he holds five honorary doctorates. In 1994, Dr. Stillman was awarded the Julian Wells Medal (Australia) and in 1999 he was appointed Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for service to scientific research. 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 he received the Basic Science award from the Society of Surgical Oncology. In 2010, Drs. Stillman and Kelly received the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize.

Dr. Stillman is a member of the Medical Advisory Board of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He advises a number of other research organizations, including the M.I.T. Cancer Center, the Lewis-Sigler Institute of Princeton University and the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Melbourne, Australia. He was chair of the Board of Scientific Councilors of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and former vice-chair of the National Cancer Policy Board. He currently serves on the Board of Scientific Advisors of the NCI and as a member of the Board of Life Sciences of the US National Research Council.