Craig Thompson, M.D., president and CEO of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, will deliver the next Flexner Discovery Lecture on May 5.
Thompson’s lecture, entitled, “Linking metabolism to stem cell maintenance,” will begin at 4 p.m. in room 208 Light Hall. It is sponsored by the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center and the Department of Cancer Biology.
The Thompson laboratory has focused on cellular metabolism — all the chemical reactions that maintain a cell — and its role in the origin and progression of cancer.
Mammalian cells depend on growth factor signaling to direct uptake of the substrates that fuel their growth: glucose and glutamine. Thompson and his colleagues are working to define the molecular signaling pathways that regulate nutrient uptake, with the hypothesis that these pathways may be mutated in cancer cells that are rapidly dividing.
Thompson earned his M.D. at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. He completed clinical training in Internal Medicine at Harvard Medical School and in Medical Oncology at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Institute at the University of Washington.
Prior to becoming president and CEO of Memorial Sloan Kettering in 2010, Thompson was director of the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine.
For a complete schedule of the Flexner Discovery Lecture series and archived video of previous lectures, go to www.mc.vanderbilt.edu/discoveryseries.
