Bruce Stillman is Director and Chief Executive Officer of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on the north shore of Long Island in New York. A native of Australia, he obtained a Bachelor of Science degree with honors at Sydney University and a Ph. D. at the John Curtin School of Medical Research at the Australian National University. He then moved to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as a Postdoctoral Fellow in 1979 and has been at the Laboratory ever since, being promoted to the scientific staff in 1981. Stillman has been Director of the Cancer Center at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory since 1992, a position he still holds. In 1994, he succeeded James D. Watson as Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Stillman's research focuses on the mechanism and regulation of DNA replication in eukaryotes, a process that ensures accurate duplication and inheritance of genetic material from one cell generation to the next.

For these research accomplishments, Stillman has received a number of honors including election as a Fellow of The Royal Society in 1993. In 1994, Stillman was awarded the Julian Wells Medal (Australia) and in 1995, he was elected a Charter Fellow of the Molecular Medicine Society. In 1999, Stillman was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for service to scientific research in the field of molecular biology. Stillman was elected in 2000 to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and in 2001 was elected as Foreign Associate of the European Molecular Biology Organization. He has received three honorary doctorates.

Stillman is a past recipient of research awards from the Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell Cancer Research Fund and the Rita Allen Foundation. He is a member of the editorial boards of a number of scientific journals, is a former chair of the Experimental Virology Review panel of the National Institutes of Health and is a member of a number of academic societies. Stillman is a member of the Scientific Advisory Boards of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the MIT Cancer Center, the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne Australia, Tularik, Inc., Immuno-Rx, Inc. and Merck and Co. He also serves on the Boards of the Academic Medicine Development Corporation (AMDEC; a non profit consortium of New York Medical and Research Institutes) and the Board of the New York Biotechnology Association. Stillman is a past co-chairman of the Board of Scientific Councilors of the National Cancer Institute and currently is a vice-chairman of the U.S. National Cancer Policy Board.