Stephen J. Elledge

Stephen Joseph Elledge is an American geneticist born August 7, 1956, in Paris, Illinois, who holds the Gregor Mendel professorship of genetics and medicine at Harvard Medical School and is affiliated with Brigham and Women's Hospital. He is credited with discovering the DNA damage response, the cellular system that senses and repairs DNA damage, identifying genes in the pathway including RNR2, DUN1, MEC1, TEL1, CHEK1 and CHEK2 and characterizing the checkpoint protein p21, and he later developed VirScan, a platform that detects prior viral infections from a small blood sample by screening antibodies against a synthetic library of viral peptides. He received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 2015, the Canada Gairdner International Award in 2013, the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences in 2017, and the Gruber Prize in Genetics in 2017, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2003.