Dr. Sally A Kornbluth

Sally Kornbluth is President of MIT. Prior to closing her lab at Duke University, her research focused on the biological signals that tell a cell to start dividing or to self-destruct -- processes that are key to understanding cancer as well as various degenerative disorders. She has published extensively on cell proliferation and programmed cell death, studying both phenomena in a variety of organisms. Her research has helped to show how cancer cells evade this programmed death, or apoptosis, and how metabolism regulates the cell death process; her work has also clarified the role of apoptosis in regulating the duration of female fertility in vertebrates.