Jennifer R. Brown, MD, PhD

Jennifer R. Brown, MD, PhD is the Director of the CLL Center of the Division of Hematologic Malignancies at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. Dr. Brown completed a B.S. and M.S. simultaneously in molecular biophysics and biochemistry (MB&B) at Yale, graduating summa cum laude with distinction in MB&B. She proceeded to Harvard Medical School where she received her MD and PhD in molecular genetics in 1998 and was awarded the James Tolbert Shipley Prize for research accomplishment in the graduating class. She then served as an intern and resident in Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital followed by fellowship in Hematology and Medical Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Dr. Brown joined the faculty of DFCI and Harvard Medical School in 2004, where she has an active clinical-translational research program in CLL.

Her particular interests include the development of novel targeted therapeutics for CLL, as well as the genomics of CLL. She has been instrumental in the clinical development of both idelalisib and ibrutinib, leading to their regulatory approvals in CLL. In the area of genomics she has been instrumental in the description of the somatic mutation profile of CLL, and is now particularly interested in the implementation of genomic technology in the clinic, including for prognosis and targeted therapy. She also has a longstanding research interest and focus on the inherited predisposition to CLL. To date she has published over 150 papers in the scientific literature, predominantly in CLL. She is an active member of the CLL Research Consortium and serves on the Alliance Leukemia and Leukemia Correlative Science Committees as well as the NIH Cancer Biomarkers Study Section. In 2014 she was the recipient of two awards from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the Clinical Innovation Award, as well as the George Canellos Award for Excellence in Clinical Investigation and Patient Care. She enjoys a worldwide reputation as a CLL expert and is in much demand as an international speaker.