Tyler Jacks

Tyler Jacks graduated from Algonquin Region High School (Northborough, MA) in 1979. He received his AB from Harvard University in 1983(magna cum laude with highest honors in biology). Jacks earned a PhD in biochemistry from the University of California, San Francisco, in 1988 under the guidance of Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus. He then went on to perform postdoctoral research at MIT in the Whitehead Institute in the laboratory of Robert Weinberg.

Jacks joined the MIT faculty as assistant professor in 1992, was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 1997, and full professor in 2000. He served as director of the MIT Center for Cancer Research and its successor, the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, from 2001 to 2021. The Koch Institute brought together cancer scientists and cancer-oriented engineers into a highly collaborative, multidisciplinary environment. Jacks was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator from 1994 to 2021.

In 2021, Jacks became president of Break Through Cancer, a cancer research foundation created to support collaborative, multi-institutional research teams focused on difficult-to-treat cancers. The organization brings together researchers from five leading cancer institutions — Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, and the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT — using a model centered on shared data, shared materials, coordinated project management, and research designed to move discoveries into clinical settings more quickly. Break Through Cancer describes its approach as “radical collaboration,” emphasizing coordination across institutions, disciplines, clinical strategy, and translational research.

He taught introductory biology (7.013) at MIT for many years and currently teaches The Hallmarks of Cancer (7.45). He served on the board of scientific advisors of the National Cancer Institute and chaired the National Cancer Advisory Board. He is a past president of the American Association for Cancer Research (2009). He was a founding co-editor of the Annual Review of Cancer Biology in 2017, serving until 2021.

Jacks is a member of the board of directors of Amgen and Thermo Fisher Scientific. and Aveo Pharmaceuticals Inc. He co-founded Dragonfly Therapeutics in 2015 and serves as chair of its scientific advisory board; he co-founded T2Biosystems in 2006 and Novello Therapeutics in 2026. He serves on the scientific advisory board of Skyhawk Therapeutics. He served previously on the scientific advisory boards of SQZ Biotech (until 2023) and Aveo Pharmaceuticals.

Jacks served on the Harvard University Board of Overseers from 2019 to 2025, including as vice chair of the board’s executive committee for the 2024–25 academic year. He is also a member of the scientific advisory board of The Francis Crick Institute (London).