Peter Karl Sorger

Peter Karl Sorger (born February 13, 1961, in Halifax Nova Scotia, Canada) is a systems and cancer biologist and Otto Krayer Professor of Systems Pharmacology in the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. Sorger is the founding head of the Harvard Program in Therapeutic Science (HiTS), director of its Laboratory of Systems Pharmacology (LSP), and co-director of the Harvard MIT Center for Regulatory Science. He was previously a Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he co-founded its program on Computational and Systems Biology (CSBi). Sorger is known for his work in the field of systems biology and for having helped launch the field of computational and systems pharmacology. His research focuses on the molecular origins of cancer and approaches to accelerate the development of new medicines. Sorger teaches Principles and Practice of Drug Development at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. Sorger was born on February 13, 1961, in Halifax Nova Scotia, Canada to Scottish and Austrian parents. His family immigrated to the US in 1963. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1983 (in Biochemistry) where he studied the assembly of icosahedral viruses under the supervision of Stephen C. Harrison. He received his PhD for Biochemistry as a Marshall Scholar from Trinity College, Cambridge for research on the transcriptional regulation of heat shock genes under the supervision of Hugh Pelham at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. He then trained as a Richard Childs Fellow and Lucille P. Markey Scholar with Harold Varmus and Andrew Murray at the University of California, San Francisco. Sorger joined the MIT Department of Biology in 1984 following a year as a visiting scientist with Anthony A. Hyman at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany. Sorger became a full Professor in the MIT Biology and Biological Engineering Departments in 2004.