Michael Kastan, MD, PhD, is the Executive Director of the Duke Cancer Institute and William and Jane Shingleton Professor of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology.

As a pediatric oncologist and a cancer biologist, Kastan conducts laboratory research concentrated on DNA damage and repair, tumor suppressor genes, and causes of cancer related to genetic predisposition and environmental exposures. His discoveries have made a major impact on our understanding of both how cancers develop and how they respond to chemotherapy and radiation therapy, and his publications reporting the roles of p53 and ATM in DNA damage signaling are among the most highly cited publications in the biomedical literature of the past 25 years. He has received numerous honors for his highly cited work, including election to the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, as well as receipt of the AACR-G.H.A. Clowes Memorial Award for outstanding contributions to basic cancer research. He has served as Chairman of the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Cancer Institute, on the Boards of Directors of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) and the American Association of Cancer Institutes (AACI), as editor-in-chief of the journal Molecular Cancer Research, and as editor of the textbook Clinical Oncology.

Kastan earned his degrees from the Washington University School of Medicine and did his clinical training in Pediatrics and Pediatric Hematology-Oncology at Johns Hopkins University. Before moving to Duke in 2011, Kastan was a Professor of Oncology, Pediatrics and Molecular Biology at Johns Hopkins University and Chair of the Hematology-Oncology department, as well as the Cancer Center Director at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.