Leonard I. Zon, MD is the Grousbeck Professor of Pediatric Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Director of the Stem Cell Program, Boston Children’s Hospital. He is founder and former president of the International Society for Stem Cell Research and chair of the Executive Committee of the recently formed Harvard Stem Cell Institute.

Dr. Zon is internationally recognized for his pioneering work in the fields of stem cell biology and cancer genetics. He has been the pre-eminent figure in establishing the zebrafish as an invaluable genetic model for the study of the blood and hematopoietic development. His laboratory focuses on the developmental biology of hematopoiesis and cancer; have undertaken chemical genetic approaches to blood development finding that prostaglandins upregulates blood stem cells; and have developed suppressor screening genetics and zebrafish models of cancer.

Dr. Zon served as 2004-2005 ASCI President, is an elected member of the NAM (2005), AAAS (2008), and NAS (2022), and was awarded the E. Donnall Thomas Lecture and Prize from American Society of Hematology, the ISEH Donald Metcalf Lecture Award and the AACR-Irving Weinstein Foundation Distinguished Lecture Award.