Neel Named Director of NYU’s Perlmutter Cancer Center

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BENJAMIN NEEL was named director of the Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center at NYU Langone Medical Center. He will begin Jan. 1, 2015.

Neel will oversee translational programs in immunotherapy, cancer genetics/targeted therapies and epigenetics, imaging, community outreach and supportive oncology. He will also be responsible for all programs throughout NYU Langone’s network of cancer-related clinical care.

Neel most recently served as director of the Ontario Cancer Institute at Princess Margaret Cancer Center. He also served as professor of medical biophysics at the University of Toronto, and holds a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in signal transduction and disease. His research has focused on cell signaling in cancer and developmental disease, functional genomics of breast cancer and ovarian cancer tumor initiating cells.

He was appointed assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in 1988, and began his own independent research laboratory in the Molecular Medicine Unit at Beth Israel Hospital, now known as Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He also served as the director of the Cancer Biology Program from 1994-2007 and as deputy director for basic research in the Hematology Division at BIDMC from 2003-2007. In 2006, he was appointed to the William B. Castle Chair of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

He is also an elected member of the Board of Directors for the American Association for Cancer Research, and previously served as the program chair for the annual meeting of the AACR.

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