Robert Weinberg (biologist)

Robert Allan Weinberg is an American biologist, born on November 11, 1942, who is the Daniel K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, director of the Ludwig Center of MIT and an American Cancer Society Research Professor. His research is in the area of oncogenes and the genetic basis of human cancer. He is affiliated with the Broad Institute and is a founding member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, and with his MIT colleague Eric Lander he co-founded Verastem, a biopharmaceutical company developing drugs that target cancer stem cells. He earned a B.S. in biology from MIT in 1964 and a PhD in biology there in 1969, was an instructor in biology at Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and did postdoctoral work at the Weizmann Institute of Science and then in the laboratory of Renato Dulbecco at the Salk Institute. He received the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences in 2013 and the Japan Prize in 2021.