Medical Alumnus Wins Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction

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 [3] 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.