Dr. Marc Wallace Kirschner is an American cell biologist and biochemist and the founding chair of the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. Kirschner’s laboratory investigates three diverse areas: regulation of the cell cycle, the role of cytoskeleton in cell morphogenesis, and mechanisms of establishing the basic vertebrate body plan.

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Dr. Kirschner was elected Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London and the Academia Europaea in 1999.  In December 2003, Kirschner received the E.B. Wilson Medal, the American Society of Cell Biology’s highest scientific honor. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has served on the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Institutes of Health and as President of the American Society for Cell Biology.

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In 1993, Dr. Kirschner arrived at Harvard Medical School from the University of California, San Francisco, where he had served on the faculty as Professor for fifteen years. Dr. Kirschner graduated from Northwestern University in 1966 and received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1971. Following postdoctoral research at Berkeley and at the University of Oxford, he was appointed an Assistant Professor at Princeton University in 1972.