Tumor biologist honored by national academies
ALUMNI | Rakesh Jain, EG ’74M, ’76PhD, who is the A. Werk Cook Professor of Radiation Oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital and a member of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).
With this new honor, Jain becomes only the ninth person elected to all three U.S. academies—the NAS, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).
Jain was elected to the IOM in 2003 and to the NAE in 2004, which cited him for “the integration of bioengineering with tumor biology and imaging gene expression and functions in vivo for drug delivery in tumors.” In his recent election to the NAS, Jain is among 72 new members and 18 foreign associates to be recognized by the academy for their distinguished and continuing achievement in research.
Jain is regarded as a pioneer in the fields of tumor biology, drug delivery, in vivo imaging and bioengineering. He is credited with fundamentally changing the thinking of scientists and clinicians about how molecularly targeted therapeutics actually work in animal models and cancer patients and how to combine them optimally to improve survival rates in cancer patients.
