Distinguished Alumnus Award

Jean-Claude ZenKlusen, Ph.D., was born in 1964 in Visp, Switzerland. He earned a Master in Sciences (Biochemistry) from the University of Buenos Aires in 1990. He received his Ph.D. in Cancer Biology & Genetics from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center UTHealth Houston Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences (formerly known as The University of Texas Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Houston) in 1995. In 1996, he took a postdoctoral position at the National Genome Research Institute, where, while participating in the Human Genome Project, he cloned two novel tumor suppressor genes. In 2003, he joined the National Cancer Institute as the senior staff scientist at the Neuro-Oncology Branch, directing the Glioma Molecular Diagnostic Initiative and its companion data portal, Rembrandt. In 2009, he became the scientific program director of the Office of Cancer Genomics, where he oversaw a variety of large-scale projects.

In August 2013, ZenKlusen was named director of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), the largest-scale cancer genomics project to date. Under his leadership, the TCGA collaborated with more than 700 scientists across the country to develop the “TCGA PanCanAtlas,” which was published in a series of papers in Cell and its sister journals in 2018. His team earned the 2015 Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medal, a People’s Choice Award, and the 2020 American Association for Cancer Research Team Science Award. In addition to TCGA, he also provided outstanding leadership for the International Genome Cancer Consortium Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes project, leading to the publication of a series of papers in Nature and its sister journals in February 2020. Internationally recognized as an expert in genomic research and genomic technologies, ZenKlusen has over 150 peer-reviewed publications, including many featured in Cell, Cancer Cell, and Nature.