Scott W. Lowe
Scott William Lowe is the Chair of the Cancer Biology and Genetics Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. He is recognized for his research on the tumor suppressor gene, p53, which is mutated in nearly half of cancers.Early life and education
Lowe was born in 1963 in Racine, Wisconsin. He enrolled at University of Wisconsin-Madison in chemical engineering in 1982 before changing his major to biology. He worked for two years after graduation as a lab technician working in a hypercholesterolemia lab. Low entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with an interest in oncogene cooperation in carcinogenesis, and went on to earn his PhD studying the role of p53 in cancer development. He stayed at MIT as a postdoctoral fellow with David Housman and Tyler Jacks.Career
He moved from MIT to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, starting his own laboratory as an assistant professor there in 1995 and continuing his work on p53. A key outcome of this research was experimental validation of oncogene-induced senescence. His laboratories findings related to the p53 gene mutation status and responsiveness of a tumor to chemotherapy was among the pieces of evidence that ushered in the era of personalized cancer medicine. He eventually became Deputy Director of the Cancer Center. Much of his work has focused on tumor suppressor genes, and their relation to drug resistance after chemotherapy treatment. In collaboration with Gregory Hannon and Stephen Elledge, he has made extensive use of RNA interference to study the roles of tumor suppressor genes. He moved to Sloan Kettering in 2011 to lead the department of Cancer Biology and Genetics. He has been an HHMI Investigator since 2005. In 2017, Dr. Lowe was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences. In 2019, Dr. Lowe was elected to the National Academy of Medicine.Awards
