Prof. Kimberly Stegmaier, MD

Professor Stegmaier is a Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, the Vice Chair of Pediatric Oncology Research at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI), and an Attending Physician at the Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) and DFCI. She is the Co-director of the Pediatric Hematologic Malignancies Program at DFCI and BCH and is also an Institute Member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. Professor Stegmaier has dedicated her laboratory-based research to the exploration of disease mechanisms and identification of new therapeutic targets for childhood cancers using innovative systems biology approaches. She won numerous awards, such as the Stand Up to Cancer and St. Baldrick’s Foundation Innovative Research Grants and a National Cancer Institute Outstanding Investigator Award. She co-founded the LEAP Consortium, which led one of the first clinical genomics studies focused on children with relapsed/refractory leukemias in North America.  She plays a leading role in other key clinical consortia in North America focused on the development of precision medicine for childhood leukemia, including the PedAL Consortium, which is dedicated to innovative clinical trials for children with high-risk leukemia and works closely with the European counterparts the Innovative Treatments for Childhood Cancer and the International BFM Study Group.

The Stegmaier laboratory integrates chemical biology and functional genomic approaches to discover new lead compounds and protein targets for cancer therapy. She has focused her efforts on childhood cancers, particularly high-risk leukemias. Several of her discoveries have led to new clinical trials for children with cancer. One of her fundamental interests is to understand how aberrant transcription factors reprogram cancer cells and how to target these mechanisms specifically, which is of central importance for very high-risk leukemias.