Edward J. Benz, Jr. M.D.
President and CEO, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Edward J. Benz, Jr. M.D., is president and chief executive officer of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, CEO of Dana-Farber/Partners Cancer Care as well as Principal Investigator and Director of Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Care and a member of the Governing Board of Dana-Farber/Children's Hospital Cancer Center. He is the Richard and Susan Smith Professor of Medicine and a Professor of Pediatrics and a Professor of Pathology and faculty dean for Oncology at Harvard Medical School. Benz is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Medical School,where his medical school thesis, completed at Children's Hospital, won the Soma Weiss and Leon Resnick Awards for research. An internationally recognized hematologist, Dr. Benz received his training at Brigham and Women's Hospital, the National Institutes of Health, and the Yale School of Medicine. Board certified in Internal Medicine and Hematology, Dr. Benz is a clinically active internist and expert in inherited anemias and diseases of the red cell.

Dr. Benz has enjoyed a distinguished career in academic internal medicine. He was among the first to apply the emerging technologies of molecular genetics to the study of human disease. His early work, started in medical school, delineated the molecular defects responsible for reduced hemoglobin synthesis in common inherited anemias called the thalassemias. Since that time, he and his laboratory group have made major contributions to our understanding of the molecular basis of hemoglobinopathies; the structure, function and regulation of genes encoding the NaK-ATPase; and, more recently, the biogenesis and molecular pathology of the red cell membrane cytoskeleton. He continues to be an active NIH funded investigator.

Dr. Benztook his first faculty position in the Department of Medicine at Yale where he was appointed Chief of the Division of Hematology in 1987. Immediately prior to assuming the presidency of Dana-Farber, he was the Chairman of the Department of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Sir William Osler Professor of Medicine, one of the most distinguished positions in academic medicine in the United States. Dr. Benz has authored over 300 peer reviewed articles, Reviews, chapters and abstracts. He is a co-editor of Hematology: Principles and Practice, widely regarded as one of the major textbooks on hematology published in the United States, the 19th edition of Principles and Practice of Medicine, and the fifth edition of the Oxford Textbook of Medicine for which he and his colleagues received the Royal Society of Authors Textbook Award. He is an associate editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Dr. Benz' accomplishments have been recognized by a number of distinctions, including membership in the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Science. He is a past president of both the American Society of Hematology and the American Society of Clinical Investigation and current president of the Association of American Cancer Institutes. In addition to numerous other NIH assignments, he chaired the NIH Director's Blue Ribbon Panel on the future of Intramural Clinical Research in 2003, co-chaired the NIH Advisory Board for Clinical Research and is currently the chair of the NHLBI working group on Sickle Cell Disease.

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