Laurie Glimcher

Laurie Hollis Glimcher (born 1951) is an American physician-scientist who was appointed president and CEO of Dana–Farber Cancer Institute in October 2016.

Glimcher graduated from the Winsor School, an all-girls private school in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1968.

In 1972, she graduated magna cum laude from Radcliffe College of Harvard University, and graduated cum laude from Harvard Medical School in 1976.

From 1991 to 2011, Glimcher was the Irene Heinz Given Professor of Immunology at the Harvard School of Public Health, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Clinically, she is a specialist in osteoporosis.

She joined the board of directors of Bristol-Myers Squibb in 1997 and retired from the board in 2017.

She was the president of the American Association of Immunologists from 2003 to 2004.

Her research laboratory received funding from Merck & Co for a project focused on developing new therapies for the treatment of osteoporosis in 2008.

From 2012 to 2016, Glimcher served as the Stephen and Suzanne Weiss Dean of Weill Cornell Medical College and the Cornell University Provost for Medical Affairs.

Glimcher received the L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science in 2014 for her work in the field of immunology and her research regarding the control of immune responses.

In 2014, she received the Margaret Kripke Legend Award.

She received the Steven C. Beering Award in 2015.

In February 2016, Laurie Glimcher was named the next president and CEO of Dana–Farber Cancer Institute.

Glimcher was considered for the position for the Dean of Harvard Medical School but turned the position down in order to become the president of the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute.

At Dana-Farber, Glimcher is collaborating on research which strives to find methods of combatting cancer from within the human immune system.

The Dana–Farber Cancer Institute is an institution that is affiliated with Harvard, as it currently is one of its teaching hospitals.

Glimcher, who was the first female dean of any medical school in New York state, became the first female to lead the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute.

Her research has had implications for understanding asthma, HIV, inflammatory bowel disease, and osteoporosis, and around 2016, on cancer immunotherapy.

Glimcher became interested in immunology during her first year of medical school at Harvard.

There she took interest dysregulation in autoimmune diseases and, in her fourth year at Harvard, discovered the protein known as Nk1.1 (see natural killer T cell), which soon became widely recognized across the field of immunology.

For this discovery, Glimcher became the first woman to receive the Soma Weiss Award, an honor her father had received 26 years earlier.

During this time, Glimcher worked with mentor Bill Paul, who strongly encouraged her to continue her research independently after completing medical school.

Glimcher currently heads her own lab for research in immunology.

She has been interested in studying the ties between ER stress system in neurons and immune function and neuro-degeneration.

Her past work has involved regulation of immune function and has shifted towards osteobiology with a focus on the bone disease osteoporosis.

Her Harvard lab has a three-year contract with Merck for the drug Fosamax, a treatment for osteoporosis.

Glimcher's more current research looks to answer the question, “How does the immune system and the ER stress system impact cancer development and progression?”

In 2017, she joined the board of GlaxoSmithKline.

In 2018, she received the American Association of Immunologists Lifetime Achievement Award.

She has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

She is a member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Association of Immunologists, American Society for Clinical Investigation, American Association of Physicians, and American Association for the Advancement of Science.

She was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019.

In 2020, she joined the board of Analog Devices.

Glimcher's research has focused on the immune system; she is known for early work with T cell differentiation, her discovery that Schnurri-3 regulates osteoblasts which led to a collaboration with Merck & Co., and her discovery of the role played by XBP-1 in lipogenesis and the unfolded protein response.

Glimcher's role helped discover Schnurri-3 (Shn3 for short) is a large zinc finger protein distantly related to Drosophila.

Shn is a potent and essential regulator of adult bone formation.

In 2020 she was named the newest member of the Stand Up to Cancer Scientific Advisory Committee.

Glimcher is the daughter of Geraldine Lee (Bogolub) and Melvin J. Glimcher, who was a pioneer in the development of artificial limbs while the chair of the Massachusetts General Hospital Orthopedics Department.

Her family is Jewish.

Glimcher followed in the footsteps of her father by later becoming a full professor at Harvard Medical School at the age of 39; the two became research partners.