Joan Massagué is chairman of the Cancer Biology and Genetics Program at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, professor at the Cornell University Graduate School of Medical Sciences, and Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in New York.

Internationally recognized for his work on the control of cell growth and fate by the TGF-(beta) family of growth factors, Massagué and his colleagues elucidated fundamental machinery that conveys growth inhibitory signals from the cell membrane to the nucleus. Combining biochemistry and genetics, Massagué identified the TGF-(beta) receptors and their mechanism of activation. TGF-(beta) signaling mechanisms are now known to be crucial in embryonic development, and their disruption contributes to tumor formation and metastasis. The latter are current topics of investigation by Massagué, who has published over 200 research articles on these subjects, and his group.

Massagué received his PhD in biochemistry from the University of Barcelona. He was a research fellow at Brown University until 1982, when he joined the Faculty of Biochemistry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School; he assumed his current position in 1989. He served in the advisory boards of the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute, the MD Anderson Cancer Center, the Fox Chase Cancer Center, the Searle Foundation and the General Motors Prize Foundation, and in the editorial boards of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, the Journal of Cell Biology, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Massagué is an elected Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Foreign Associate of the European Molecular Biology Organization.

Awards and Accomplishments

• Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1999)