Craig B. Thompson MD

Craig B. Thompson, MD, became President and Chief Executive Officer of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center — the world’s oldest and largest private institution devoted to cancer prevention, treatment, research, and education — in November 2010.

For the previous 11 years, Dr. Thompson was affiliated with The University of Pennsylvania. He joined the university in 1999 as a professor of medicine, scientific director of The Leonard and Madlyn Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute, and the first chairman of the Department of Cancer Biology. In 2006 he was named Director of the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania and Associate Vice President for Cancer Services of the University of Pennsylvania Health System.

Dr. Thompson received his bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College and went on to earn his medical degree in 1977 from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. He received clinical training in internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and in medical oncology at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Institute at the University of Washington. After completing his training, Dr. Thompson became a physician at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and an assistant professor of medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.

In 1987, he joined the faculty of the University of Michigan as an assistant professor of medicine and an assistant investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). From 1993 until he joined the University of Pennsylvania, he was affiliated with the University of Chicago, where he was a professor of medicine, an HHMI investigator, and Director of the Gwen Knapp Center for Lupus and Immunology Research.