Awards:
National Institutes of Health Award for Meritorious Research in 1990

Boards:
Scientific Advisory Board, Hollings Cancer Center, and previously, Scientific Advisory Board, Center for Advanced Biotechnology & Medicine, Rutgers University

One of my favorite quotes:
"The mark of an educated individual is to demand no more precision from a subject than the subject itself allows."
Aristotle

In my own words:

At Millennium:
I direct all of the Research and Drug Discovery functions. I joined the company in 1999 as Vice President of Oncology. Our research teams are driving breakthrough science by capturing their human and scientific passion for developing new medicines for people with life threatening and debilitating diseases.

Millennium research and drug discovery scientists – like thousands of other oncology pharmaceutical researchers around the globe, do what we do for reasons far more noble than the generation of corporate profit. We are collectively the innovative and creative 'drug hunters and craftsmen' of the industry and – fully understanding the enormous challenge of our mission – represent perhaps the largest congregation of optimists in the galaxy.

The main reason I chose my field:
I did not choose cancer research as my life's work, it chose me. While my Ph.D. work was in the field of Cellular Immunology, I chose Animal Virology as a field for post-doctoral training. My intent was simply to understand more about how animal viruses could be used to gain knowledge about more complex biological systems much in the way bacterial viruses were used to gain insight into the biology of bacteria. This happened during the mid 1970's when animal tumor virus research was beginning shed some light on the genetic basis of cancer. The virus that I worked on as a post doctoral fellow turned out to be one of those viruses that could cause cancer in rodents although how this occurred was unknown. Following my post-doctoral training I joined the National Institutes of Health where I focused on trying to understand the molecular mechanism through which this virus caused cancer in animals. I was fortunate to be one of the scientists who helped solve this mystery in the mid 1980's by demonstrating that a single virus encoded protein bound to and activated host cell signal transduction enzymes leading to cancer. As it turned out, many of these same enzymes are now known to play similar roles in the genesis of human cancer. Thus, my fascination and simple curiosity about how viruses could induce cancer in animals set the path that I have followed for almost 30 years.