Dr. Tim Mitchison

Vice-chair of the Department, and Co-chair of the Ph.D. program in Systems Biology

Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Dr. Tim Mitchison is Vice-chair of the Department, and Co-chair of the Ph.D. program in Systems Biology, Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences

in Cambridge. Dr. Mitchison received his B.A. in Biochemistry from Oxford University, England, in 1980, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), in Biochemistry and Biophysics in 1984, where he worked with Professor Marc Kirschner. Since his Ph.D. work, Dr. Mitchison has been interested in how cells move and divide, which he has studied using microscopy, biochemistry and genetics. One of his favorite model systems is the frog egg, which divides rapidly, and can be ground up to make an extract that recapitulates the biochemistry of dividing cells in a test tube. He has made important discoveries in the fundamental biochemistry of cell division, most notably microtubule dynamic instability with Marc Kirschner in 1984.

Dr. Mitchison has a long-standing interest in how drugs work, and he joined the faculty of Pharmacology at UCSF in 1987. He rose to full professor at UCSF, and then moved to Harvard Medical School in 1997. At HMS he co-founded the Institute of Chemistry and Cell Biology with Stuart Schreiber, a noted Harvard chemist. This was one of the first academic labs to implement high-throughput screening to find small molecule drug leads. Mitchison and Schreiber discovered several important small molecule tools, notably monastrol, a small molecule inhibitor of cell division that lead to a new class of experimental anti-cancer drug. This class ultimately failed in the clinic, and Mitchison is currently conducting research using mouse cancer models to understand why, and lay the foundation for improved future drugs.