Sloan Kettering Institute Director Thomas J. Kelly has been named a member of the Advisory Committee to the Director (ACD) at the National Institutes of Health.
ACD was created in 1966 to advise the NIH director on policy and planning issues important to the NIH mission of conducting and supporting biomedical and behavioral research, providing research training, and translating research results for the public. Dr. Kelly and four other new members will join the 15 members already on the committee.
Dr. Kelly joined Memorial Sloan Kettering in 2002 as the Director of Sloan Kettering Institute, after a 30-year career at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he served as Director of the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics and Director of the Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences. His research focuses on how the genome is duplicated during the eukaryotic cell cycle with particular emphasis on the ways DNA replication is initiated and controlled. Using animal viruses as models, Dr. Kelly’s laboratory developed the first cell-free systems for studying the biochemistry of DNA replication in human cells. More recently he has focused on the links between DNA replication and the progression of the cell cycle in human cells and in the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe, which shares many properties with higher eukaryotes.
Dr. Kelly was a co-winner of the 2004 Alfred P. Sloan Jr. Prize for his seminal contributions to the understanding of the molecular mechanisms of eukaryotic DNA replication. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.
