Mark Lemmon named the Sackler Professor of Pharmacology

Mark A. Lemmon, newly named as the David A. Sackler Professor of Pharmacology, is a biochemist and structural biologist whose research focuses on how molecules work and how cells signal, especially in growth control.

Lemmon is co-director of the Yale Cancer Biology Institute at Yale’s West Campus, a research institute of approximately a dozen faculty laboratories focused on the core science of cancer. The Institute — currently in the development stage — will bring together a diverse group of scientists to focus on complementary areas of research in cancer biology. The primary goal is to pinpoint the root molecular causes of cancer, identify new molecular targets, and develop new drug treatments to contain or even eradicate them. Lemmon aims to recruit faculty to open new labs at the rate of two to three per year, and by 2020 expects the institute to be fully staffed with around 120 researchers.

A graduate of the University of Oxford, Lemmon earned his M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale, and completed postdoctoral training at New York University Medical Center as a Damon Runyon Fellow. He then served on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine for 19 years, most recently as the George W. Raiziss Professor and Chair of Biochemistry and Biophysics, as well as an investigator in Penn’s Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute. He came to Yale in June 2015 as a professor of pharmacology.

Lemmon has contributed over 100 articles to top-tier peer-reviewed journals such as Nature, Cell, and Molecular Cell, and is a frequently called-upon commentator on advances in his field. In addition to leading an active and visible laboratory, Lemmon has been recognized with several editorial positions at prestigious journals in the field, including Cell and Molecular Cell, among other publications, and is vice chair for the Americas at the Biochemical Journal. He also serves on numerous advisory boards, and served two terms as secretary of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB).

The Yale professor is the recipient of numerous research grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense. His honors include the Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin Award of the Protein Society and the Stanley N. Cohen Biomedical Research Award from the University of Pennsylvania.