Daniel Haber

Daniel Haber is director of the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Cancer Center and the Kurt Isselbacher Professor of Oncology at Harvard Medical School (HMS). His research has focused primarily in the field of cancer genetics, resulting in discoveries on the origin of the pediatric kidney cancer Wilms tumor, genetic predispositions to breast cancer and mutations that define a subset of “non-smoker” lung cancers that are uniquely sensitive to targeted new therapies. In collaboration with MGH bioengineer Dr. Mehmet Toner, Daniel’s laboratory has developed a novel technology for isolating rare circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from the blood of cancer patients—a tool that may have profound implications for early diagnosis of cancer and for non-invasive molecular profiling of cancers during therapy. His numerous awards include a MERIT Award from the National Cancer Institute, a Dream Team Award from the Prostate Cancer Foundation and a Dream Team Award from Stand-Up-To-Cancer and the Richard and Linda Rosenthal Memorial Award from the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). He was appointed to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 2008, and he was elected to the Institute of Medicine in 2009, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2018. He received his M.D./Ph.D. from Stanford in 1983, completed an internal medicine residency at MGH, clinical oncology training at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) and a postdoctoral research fellowship at MIT.