Rate My Professor Gary Gilliland

D. Gary Gilliland, MD, PhD, is a physician-scientist whose work in Biology at Fred Hutch Cancer Center has advanced the understanding of the genetic basis of blood diseases, particularly leukemia. He earned a BS in Bacteriology from the University of California, Davis in 1975, a PhD in Microbiology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1980, and an MD from the University of California, San Francisco in 1984. Gilliland completed his internal medicine residency, serving as chief medical resident, and his hematology and medical oncology fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard Medical School. He spent 20 years at Harvard Medical School as Professor of Medicine and Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, where he was an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Director of the Leukemia Program at the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center. His research focused on hematologic malignancies, including myeloproliferative diseases, acute leukemias, and myelodysplastic syndromes, emphasizing signal transduction, transcriptional activation, murine models, and molecularly targeted therapies translated from bench to bedside.

In industry and academia, Gilliland served as Senior Vice President and Global Oncology Franchise Head at Merck Research Laboratories from 2009 to 2013, leading the development of the immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab (Keytruda) to FDA approval. He then became Vice Dean for Precision Medicine and Vice President of Precision Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. From 2015 to early 2020, he led Fred Hutch Cancer Center as President and Director, fostering faculty growth, quadrupling the endowment, expanding federal grant funding, and establishing Integrated Research Centers to promote interdisciplinary collaborations within the Fred Hutch/University of Washington Cancer Consortium. Gilliland has received prestigious awards, including the Sydney C. Rittenberg Award (1978), Gold-Headed Cane Award (1984), Jose Carreras Scholar Award (1990), William Dameshek Prize from the American Society of Hematology (2003), Stanley J. Korsmeyer Award from the American Society for Clinical Investigation (2007), election to the National Academy of Medicine (2015), American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2016), and fellowship in the AACR Academy (2018). He holds memberships in the National Academy of Medicine, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Society for Clinical Investigation, and Association of American Physicians.