Peter Besmer, PhD, is an emeritus member of Memorial Sloan Kettering. From 1979 to 2002, he was a member of the Molecular Biology Program in the Sloan Kettering Institute, and from 2002 to 2014 he was a member of the Developmental Biology Program in SKI.

Dr. Besmer’s research has focused on the mechanisms by which receptor tyrosine kinases produce cellular responses during hematopoiesis and gametogenesis, using the Kit receptor tyrosine kinase as a model. He used mouse genome engineering to develop animal models to investigate Kit as an oncogenic driver of Gastointenstinal Stromal Tumors (GIST).

Dr. Besmer was born in Winterthur, Switzerland. He received his doctorate from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. He did postdoctoral training at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with H. G. Khorana and at MIT with David Baltimore.