V. CRAIG JORDAN will join MD Anderson Cancer Center as a professor in Breast Medical Oncology and Molecular and Cellular Oncology. He will begin work in October.
Jordan will focus on the biology of estrogen-induced cell death, with the goal of developing translational approaches for treatment.
Currently, he serves as scientific director of the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center at Georgetown University and as the Vincent T. Lombardi Chair of Translational Cancer Research.
He also serves as vice chairman of the Department of Oncology and professor of oncology and pharmacology at Georgetown University’s Medical School. In addition, he’s a visiting professor of molecular medicine at the University of Leeds in England, and an adjunct professor of molecular pharmacology and biological chemistry at Northwestern University in Chicago.
Jordan was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2009, and has been awarded the St. Gallen Prize for Breast Cancer, the American Cancer Society Medal of Honor, and the David A. Karnofsky Award from the American Society of Clinical Oncology.
Jordan is credited with reinventing a failed contraceptive, known then as ICI 46474, as the breast cancer drug tamoxifen. The drug, in existence since the 1960s, was originally created to block estrogen in the hopes of preventing pregnancy.
Jordan developed the strategy of long-term adjuvant tamoxifen therapy, as well as describing and deciphering the properties of a new group of medicines called selective estrogen receptor modulators.
Prior to joining Georgetown University, Jordan served on the faculties at Northwestern University Medical School; the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine; the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research at the University of Berne, Switzerland; and the University of Leeds, England.
