Michael B. Yaffe

Biography

 Dr. Yaffe is the David H. Koch Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering at MIT and Attending Surgeon at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School. He completed a residency in General Surgery, a Fellowship in Surgical Critical Care, Burns and Trauma at Harvard Medical School, and post-doctoral training in Signal Transduction with Lew Cantley in Cell Biology at Harvard. He received his B.S. degree in Materials Science and Engineering at Cornell University, and his M.D. in 1989 and Ph.D. degree in 1987 from Case Western Reserve University in Biophysical Chemistry.

Research Interest

 The goal of the Yaffe group’s research is to understand how signaling pathways are integrated at the molecular and systems level to control cellular responses. The Yaffe lab is particularly interested in: (1) signaling pathways and networks that control cell cycle progression and DNA damage responses in cancer and cancer therapy; and (2) cross-talk between inflammation, cytokine signaling and cancer. Much of our work focuses on how modular protein domains and kinases work together to build molecular signaling circuits.  The work is multi-disciplinary and encompasses biochemistry, biophysics, structural and cell biology, engineering, and computation/bioinformatics-based methods."