Philip Hanawalt, PhD

Dr. Morris Herzstein Professor of Biology, Stanford

Philip Hanawalt is the Dr. Morris Herzstein Professor of Biology at Stanford, where he has served as Director of the Biophysics Graduate Program and Chair of the Biology Department. He graduated from Oberlin College, completed his Ph.D. in biophysics at Yale University, and held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Copenhagen and Caltech before joining the Stanford faculty in 1961. He co-discovered the ubiquitous pathway of excision-repair of damaged DNA in 1964, and then discovered transcription-coupled repair (TCR) several decades later; his recent work focuses upon TCR mechanisms and “gratuitous” TCR that may occur during transcription through DNA sequences that can form non-canonical structures to cause genomic instability. He held an Outstanding Investigator Grant from the National Cancer Institute for 14 years and a Senior Scholar Research Grant from the Ellison Medical Foundation. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Microbiology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as a Foreign Associate of the European Molecular Biology Organization. He has served as president of the Environmental Mutagen Society (EMS) and on the Board of Directors for the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). He has won research awards from the American Society for Photobiology, the EMS, the International Mutation Research Award and the AACR-Princess Takamatsu Cancer Research Lectureship, as well as awards for teaching and mentoring students in research. He has served as a Senior Editor for Cancer Research and is currently a member of the Editorial Board for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.