Ralph DeBerardinis

Ralph DeBerardinis, M.D., Ph.D. is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board at Vida Ventures.

Ralph has been on the faculty at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center since 2008. He is a Professor in the Children’s Medical Center Research Institute and an Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Ralph serves as Chief of Pediatric Genetics and Metabolism and directs the Genetic and Metabolic Disease Program at UT Southwestern. His laboratory studies the role of altered metabolic states in human diseases, including cancer and pediatric inborn errors of metabolism. He has published over 200 research articles in genetics and metabolism and is on the editorial board of several journals. He has also served on the Scientific Advisory Boards of several companies, including Agios Pharmaceuticals and Peloton Therapeutics.

Ralph was born and raised in the Philadelphia area, earning a B.S. in Biology from St. Joseph’s University and M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. He trained in Pediatrics, Medical Genetics and Clinical Biochemical Genetics at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, ultimately obtaining board certification in all three areas. Ralph performed post-doctoral work with Craig Thompson, M.D., in the Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute at Penn, where he began to establish versatile systems to assess metabolism in cancer cells and tissues. Work in the DeBerardinis lab at UT Southwestern has uncovered new pathways and new metabolic liabilities in human cancer, and has used clinical genomics and metabolomics to identify new Mendelian metabolic diseases in children.

Dr. DeBerardinis has received several awards for his laboratory’s contributions, including an Outstanding Investigator Award from the National Cancer Institute in 2017 and the Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award in Medicine from the Academy of Medicine, Engineering & Science of Texas in 2019. He was elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation in 2012 and to the Association of American Physicians and National Academy of Medicine in 2020.