Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York City

Dr. Kenneth Offit is Chief of the Clinical Genetics Service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, a Member of the Program in Cancer Biology and Genetics at the Sloan Kettering Institute, incumbent of the Robert and Kate Niehaus Chair in Inherited Cancer Genomics, and Professor of Medicine at the Weill College of Medicine of Cornell University. He is a graduate of Princeton University, the Harvard School of Public Health, and the Harvard Medical School. In 1996, his laboratory team discovered the most common genetic mutation, in BRCA2, associated with inherited breast and ovarian cancer occurring among Jews of European ancestry, and his group played a leading role in the discovery of other cancer causing mutations in this same population. Dr. Offit’s group also discovered or described genetic alterations causing increased risk for colon and prostate cancer and two genetic syndromes of inherited childhood lymphoblastic leukemia. In 2013, he was honored with the American Society of Clinical Oncology-American Cancer Society award for his work in cancer prevention. He has served on the Board of Scientific Counselors of the U.S. National Cancer Institute, and is co-Chair of the Hereditary Cancer Working Group of the ClinGen initiative of the National Human Genome Research Institute. In 2016, he was elected into the National Academy of Medicine, of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.