Rameen Beroukhim, MD, PhD

Dr. Rameen Beroukhim is Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and in the Departments of Medical Oncology and Cancer Biology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and is a practicing oncologist in the Center for Neurooncology at the Dana-Farber.  He is also an Associate Member of the Broad Institute.  His primary interest is in understanding the mutations that lead to cancer, and what these mutations can tell us about how individual cancers behave.

Education:

• BA in Physics and Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley
• PhD University of Cambridge, England
• MD Internal Medicine, University of California, San Francisco

Residency:

• Internal Medicine, University of California, San Francisco

Fellowships:

• Medical Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
• Medical Oncology, Massachusetts General Hospital  

Much of Dr. Beroukhim’s work has focused on copy-number changes in cancer and on the development of computational approaches to large genomic datasets. An example is the Genomic Identification of Significant Targets In Cancer (GISTIC) algorithm, which distinguishes driver from passenger copy-number changes and identifies genes likely to be targeted by the driver events. Dr. Beroukhim has applied these approaches to thousands of cancer copy-number profiles across a range of diseases. These efforts have identified novel amplified oncogenes such as MCL1 and BCL2L1, have identified prognostic indicators in endometrial and ovarian cancers, and have identified predictors of pathway dependency in several cancer types such as glioblastoma and renal cancer.

Dr. Beroukhim received his B.A. in Physics and Philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley.  He then received Churchill and Glaxo Dorothy Hodgkin Scholarships to study for his M.Phil.and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Cambridge, England, where his Ph.D. thesis was awarded a Max Perutz Prize.  He returned to the United States to complete his M.D. and residency training in Internal Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and fellowship training in Medical Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital.