Professor Bruce Stillman
Professor Bruce Stillman was born in Melbourne, Australia and graduated Bachelor of Science with first class honors at the University of Sydney and PhD in medical microbiology at the John Curtin School of Medical Research within the Australian National University.
He moved to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) as a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in 1979 and has been at the Laboratory ever since. He is currently the Oliver R. Grace Professor.
Professor Stillman was Director of the CSHL Cancer Center from 1992 to 2016.
In 1994, he succeeded Nobel laureate Dr James D. Watson as Director and Chief Executive Officer of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and was appointed President and Chief Executive Officer in 2003.
Professor Stillman's research focuses on the mechanism and regulation of duplication of DNA and chromatin in eukaryotic cells. This process ensures that the genome is replicated completely and only once before cell division.
He and his colleagues identified key DNA replication initiation proteins and also proteins that support DNA synthesis and chromatin assembly during DNA replication. For these discoveries he has been elected to The Royal Society (UK), the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Australian Academy of Sciences.
Professor Stillman has received numerous awards and prizes, including the Alfred P. Sloan Prize from the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation (2004); the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University (2010); the Herbert Tabor Research Award from The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (2014); the Canada Gairdner International Award (2019) and the Heineken Prize in Biochemistry and Biophysics from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (2020). In 2021, he received the Australian Advance Global Impact award. In the Australia Day 1999 Honours List, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for “service to scientific research in the field of molecular biology, particularly through the analysis of DNA replication in the living cell.”
Professor Stillman is an advisor to universities, foundations, corporations and government agencies. He is a member of the Medical Advisory Board of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and advises a number of other research organisations, including the Koch Institute of Integrative Cancer Research at MIT and Monash University’s Biomedicine Discovery Institute. He is past chair of the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), former vice-chair of the US National Cancer Policy Board and a former member of both the Board of Scientific Advisors of the NCI and the Board of Life Sciences of the National Research Council.