CCE Advisory Council External Members

Myles Brown, MD, is a Professor of Medicine at DFCI and HMS as well as a practicing physician in oncology at the Brigham And Women's Hospital. Dr. Brown's research laboratory focuses on elucidating the epigenetic factors underlying the action of steroid hormones. This work has important implications both for normal physiology and for the treatment of hormone dependent malignancies including breast and prostate cancer. He is recognized for three seminal discoveries. His lab opened the steroid receptor coregulator field, illuminated the dynamic nature of receptor and coregulator interaction with the genome and elucidated the importance of epigenetically determined distant cis-regulatory steroid receptor binding sites. His contributions have uniquely reformulated the understanding of steroid hormone action in normal physiology and in hormone-dependent cancer.

Frank H. Laukien, PhD, is the Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Bruker Corporation (Nasdaq: BRKR). He is also a Visiting Scholar in the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative and the Harvard University Department of Chemistry & Chemical Biology. Dr. Laukien served as a director of the Analytical, Life Science and Diagnostic Association (ALDA) for several terms, including as Chairman from 2002 to 2003. He holds a Bachelor of Science in physics from MIT (1984), as well as a Ph.D. in chemical physics from Harvard University (1988). He served on the Dean’s Advisory Committee of the School of Science of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until 2014. He serves on the Visiting Committee for the MIT Department of Chemistry. In 2017, he was elected a Senator of acatech, the German National Academy of Science and Engineering. Dr. Laukien was lead organizer of the Cancer & Evolution Symposium, Oct. 14-16, 2020, and he is now the lead organizer of the Cancer & Evolution Symposium Series (CESS) as of December 2020.

Michael Yaffe, MD, PhD, is the David H. Koch Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering at MIT and Attending Surgeon at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School. The Yaffe Lab is interested in understanding how signaling pathways are integrated at the molecular and sytems level to control cellular responses. Their interest has particularly focused on signaling pathways and networks that control cell cycle progression and DNA damage responses in cancer and cancer therapy, as well as the cross-talk between inflammation, cytokine signaling and cancer. Additionally, their work is directed to understanding how modular protein domains and kinases work together to build molecular signaling circuits. The research is multi-disciplinary and encompasses biochemistry, biophysics, strutural and cell biology, engineering, and computation/bioinformatics.