Harold Varmus
Dr. Harold Varmus is a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who was director of the National Institutes of Health from 1993 to 1999 and the 14th Director of the National Cancer Institute from 2010 to 2015, a post to which he was appointed by then-President Barack Obama. He was the recipient of the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes. He is currently the Lewis Thomas University Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College and a senior associate at the New York Genome Center. He graduated from Amherst College with a BA in English literature. He earned a graduate degree from Harvard in English in 1962 before switching disciplines and beginning his journey as a medical doctor. He attended Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and later worked at a missionary hospital in Bareilly, India. Dr. Varmus joined the Public Health Service at the National Institutes of Health in 1968. In 1970, he began his post-doctoral research in the Bishop’s lab at University of California, San Francisco.