Ralph Scully is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the co-director of the Program in DNA Repair and Genomic Instability at the Cancer Research Institute, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Dr. Scully majored in Medical Sciences and English literature at the University of Cambridge (UK). He completed clinical medical training at University College London and received the M.B.B.S. degree (equivalent to the M.D. degree in the USA) in 1986. Following several years of additional training in internal medicine, he joined Prof. Herman Waldman’s laboratory as a graduate student and obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1994 for research on Mechanisms of Immunological Tolerance. He moved to Harvard for postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Dr. David Livingston at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. There, he discovered that the major hereditary breast/ovarian cancer predisposition genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2, act by regulating double strand break (DSB) repair and homologous recombination (HR). In 2001, he moved to the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center to establish a laboratory focused on homologous recombination, genomic instability and hereditary breast/ovarian cancer predisposition. His work has revealed new functions for BRCA1 and BRCA2 in regulating HR at sites of stalled replication and recently elucidated the mechanism underlying the Tandem Duplication “rearrangement signature” associated with BRCA1-linked cancer. His research has yielded promising new targets for therapy in BRCA-linked cancer. A major current focus of his laboratory is to identify the earliest signs of impending cancer in the overtly normal mammary epithelium.
http://www.dfhcc.harvard.edu/insider/member-detail/member/ralph-scully-mbbs-phd/