HMS alumnus Siddhartha Mukherjee wins Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction

Siddhartha Mukherjee, M.D. '00, is honored for The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.

Joining a long and notable list of Harvard-affiliated physicians whose skill with words has enabled them to educate audiences far beyond their immediate circles of patients and colleagues, Siddhartha Mukherjee, M.D. '00, has been awarded the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for a work of general nonfiction for his book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (Scribner). The Pulitzer judges praised the work as “an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science.”

Mukherjee is currently an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University; his lab "works on acute myeloid leukemia and pre-leukemic diseases, such as myelodysplasia (MDS)," seeking to “understand the pathogenesis of AML and MDS in order to develop novel drugs” against them.

 

Profiles from our archives of Atul Gawande and Jerome Groopman offer introductions to other Harvard-affiliated physician-authors. 

You might also like

In 2004, a frenzy spread across Harvard Yard in days. Four billion users later, we are only just catching up.

The play Spare Parts is a contemporary fable about the quest to live forever.

Plus, veteran higher education leader Thomas Ehrlich reflects on university curricula for his 70th reunion

Most popular

All That’s Unseen charts the Harvard graduate’s uneasy journey from Appalachia to Cambridge and back.  

An animal’s journey from grief to love shows how much humans need each other, too.

In 1954, Gregory Corso moved into Eliot House. How he stayed there is a literary legend.

Explore More From Current Issue

Three young women posed side by side against red background.

The 2026-2027 Ledecky and Summer Undergraduate Fellows

A woman with long, wavy hair wearing a white suit, seated in a bright, modern room.

The Harvard graduate’s roundtable talk show touches on hot button issues from religion to sex. 

A smiling elderly man in glasses sits comfortably in a striped armchair.

Plus, veteran higher education leader Thomas Ehrlich reflects on university curricula for his 70th reunion