Jason W. Locasale PhD

Dr. Locasale, Ph.D. is a faculty member at Duke University in the Department of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology and leads the Cancer Metabolism Group at the Duke Cancer Institute. He graduated from Rutgers University, Summa Cum Laude with degrees in Chemistry and Physics. He received his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Biological Engineering. He then moved to Harvard Medical School where he worked as an American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellow. Dr. Locasale is a recipient of the NIH Pathway to Independence Award, the International Life Sciences Future Leader Award, the Benjamin Trump Award for Excellence in Cancer Research from the Aspen Cancer Society, and the American Cancer Society Research Scholar Award. Dr. Locasale’s leadership roles includes numerous advisory and committees for industry, national and international non-profit funding organizations, and government agencies. His laboratory is funded primarily by NIH.

He currently serves on the editorial board of PLoS Biology, Oncotarget, and Cell Stress. He has authored over 100 publications in journals such as Cell, Science, and Nature and has authored numerous textbooks and patents. Dr. Locasale’s research focuses on an integrative understanding of metabolism in health and disease. He has made seminal contributions to our understanding of metabolism including the discovery of the role of serine synthesis in cancers, the characterization of the role and druggability of the Warburg Effect in cancer metabolism, and the discovery of how metabolism and nutrition mediate epigenetics in normal physiology. His laboratory develops and applies state of the art computational and mass spectrometry-based technology that integrates with molecular biology, animal models, genomics, physiology, and data from human cohorts. Together this research aims to transform our understanding of metabolism to advance patient care.