Bruce Stillman

About Bruce Stillman, AO, PhD, FAA, FRS

Dr. Bruce Stillman was born in Melbourne, Australia and graduated Bachelor of Science with first class honors at the University of Sydney and Ph.D. at the John Curtin School of Medical Research within the Australian National University. He moved to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) as a Postdoctoral Fellow in 1979 and has been at the Laboratory ever since and is currently the President and Oliver R. Grace Professor. Dr. Stillman was Director of the CSHL Cancer Center from 1992-2016. In 1994, he succeeded Nobel laureate James D. Watson as Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and was appointed President in 2003.

Dr. Stillman's research focuses on the mechanism and regulation of duplication of DNA and chromatin in eukaryotic cells, a process that ensures that the genome is replicated completely and only once before cell division. He and his colleagues identified key DNA replication initiation proteins and also proteins that support DNA synthesis and chromatin assembly during DNA replication. For these discoveries he has been elected to The Royal Society (UK), the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Australian Academy of Sciences. He has received honors, including the Order of Australian (AO) in 1999 for his medical research and the Australia Advance Global Impact Award in 2021. Dr. Stillman has also received a number of awards and prizes, including the Alfred P. Sloan Prize from the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation (2004), the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University (2010), the Herbert Tabor Research Award from The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (2014), the prestigious Canada Gairdner International Award (2019) and the prestigious Heineken Prize in Biochemistry and Biophysics from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (2020) and the Earl and Thressa Stadtman Distinguished Scientist Award from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (2024). He has received seven honorary doctorates.

He is an advisor to universities, foundations, corporations and government agencies. Dr. Stillman is a member of the Medical Advisory Board of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and advises several other research organizations, including the M.I.T. Cancer Center and the Biomedicine Discovery Institute at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He is a member of the jury for the Lasker Foundation Awards and is past chair of the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), former vice-chair of the National Cancer Policy Board, and a former member of both the Board of Scientific Advisors of the NCI and the Board of Life Sciences of the US National Research Council.