Todd R. Golub

Biosketch

Todd Golub is director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and a founding core member of the institute. He is also a member of the faculty of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School.

Golub is a physician-scientist who pioneered the application of genomics to cancer biology and therapeutic discovery. He is one of the first researchers to use genomic approaches to molecularly characterize human tumors, laying the foundation for the use of genomics to classify, diagnose, and treat cancer. Throughout his career, Golub has advocated for the free, rapid sharing of genomic data and tools to accelerate the pace of biomedicine, and is deeply committed to patient-focused research.

Golub is the recipient of multiple awards, including the Erasmus Hematology Award, the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Memorial Award, the Outstanding Achievement Award from the American Association for Cancer Research, the Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research, the E. Mead Johnson Award from the Society for Pediatric Research, and the Judson Daland Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Clinical Investigation from the American Philosophical Society. Golub is also an elected member of the US National Academy of Medicine.

Research Interests

The Golub laboratory focuses primarily on projects at the intersection of cancer biology, cancer medicine and genomic technologies, with a goal of enabling cancer precision medicine. Projects involve the genomic characterization of human tumors using a wide range of approaches, including comprehensive analysis of tumor genomes and transcriptomes, increasingly with spatial resolution. Projects also focus on using functional genomic and chemical biology approaches to the discovery of novel cancer vulnerabilities (“dependencies”) that may serve as targets for therapeutic discovery. The lab also contributes to the creation of data resources to propel research broadly. Such resources include the Connectivity Map (a systematic transcriptional profiling of cellular perturbation) and the Cancer Dependency Map (a systematic profiling of the growth effects of genetic and small molecule perturbation across hundreds of cancer models).