MARCH 11, 2025, NEW YORK - Ludwig Cancer Research extends its congratulations to Ludwig Harvard's Bradley Bernstein on his election as Fellow of the Academy of the American Association for Cancer Research.
Each year, the AACR nominates a handful of researchers and vets them through a rigorous, peer-reviewed process that ensures only those who have made profound and lasting contributions to cancer research and related fields are ultimately elected to its Academy. Bernstein is one of 33 researchers so honored this year.
As a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard, Bernstein helped pioneer the mapping and functional analysis of the epigenome-the chemical modifications made to DNA and its histone protein packaging that regulate the genome's expression. His studies over the past couple of decades have illuminated on a large scale how epigenetic modifications inform chromatin structure, orchestrate such processes as embryonic development and, when disordered, drive cancer.
Bernstein, who is chair of cancer biology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and director of the epigenomics program at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was recognized by the AACR Academy for his "seminal contributions to cancer epigenetics, including the discovery of bivalent chromatin domains that regulate developmental gene activation and the role of IDH mutations in disrupting chromosomal topology, resulting in the establishment of new mechanisms by which to characterize tumors and optimize therapeutic strategies."
