Chris Bakal

Chris Bakal is a Team Leader in the Division of Cancer Biology at the Chester Beatty Laboratories, Institute of Cancer Research (ICR). He performed graduate work in Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto. In 2005, he began postdoctoral work with Norbert Perrimon at Harvard Medical School and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In 2006, he became an affiliate of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. While at Harvard, Dr Bakal developed different functional genomic and computational technologies to understand the signaling networks that control cell shape determination. After being awarded a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellowship, Chris established his laboratory at the ICR in 2009.

As a postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Bakal was awarded the Dorsett L. Spurgeon Award as the top postdoctoral fellow or junior faculty member at Harvard Medical School. In 2009, he received an Outstanding Research Award from Nature Biotechnology. While at the ICR, Chris was named one of the top 2 young investigators by the European Association for Cancer Research in 2011. In 2013, he was awarded the Astra Zeneca Frank Rose Prize as the United Kingdom’s top young cancer researcher. In 2014, he was awarded the Merrimack Pharmaceuticals Prize in Systems Biology by the Council of Systems Biology. In 2015 Chris was awarded the Cancer Research UK Future Leaders Prize

Outside of science Chris is competitive track cyclist, and a former world-ranked downhill ski racer.