William R. Sellers, MD

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Elected 2004
Dr. William Sellers is currently VP/Global Head of Oncology for the Novartis Institutes of BioMedical Research where he oversees the small molecule and antibody-based drug discovery efforts in oncology conducted by research groups based in Cambridge, MA, Basel Switzerland and Emeryville, CA. Dr. William Sellers is formerly a Principal Investigator at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He was also an Associate Member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. Dr. Sellers’ past research efforts were focused on understanding genetic alterations in prostate and other cancers through the use of high-resolution genomic approaches including high-density single-nucleotide polymorphism arrays and high-throughput gene resequencing. These efforts led to the discovery of MITF as an oncogene in melanoma and oncogenic activating mutations in EGFR in lung adenocarcinoma and glioblastoma. Dr. Sellers has won research funding from a number of organizations including the National Cancer Institute, the Damon-Runyon Cancer Research Foundation, and the Prostate Cancer Research Foundation. He also received the Abbott Bioresearch Award and the Tisch Family Outstanding Investigator Award. Dr. Sellers completed his internship and residency in internal medicine at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco and completed a clinical oncology fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute where he did post-doctoral training with Bill Kaelin and David Livingston. He graduated from Georgetown University and earned his M.D. from the University of Massachusetts Medical School.