Joseph Schlessinger has been the William H. Prusoff Professor and Chairman of the Department of Pharmacology at Yale University School of Medicine since 2001. He served as the Director of the Skirball Institute for Biomolecular Medicine at New York University (NYU) Medical Center and the Milton and Helen Kimmelman Professor and Chairman of the Department of Pharmacology at NYU Medical School.
He was a faculty member of the Weizmann Institute and the Ruth and Leonard Simon Professor of Cancer Research in the Department of Immunology. Dr. Schlessinger was a Research Director for Rorer Biotechnology. He founded Sugen, Inc. in 1991, Plexxikon in 2001, and Kolltan in 2008. Dr. Schlessinger holds a B.Sc. in chemistry and physics and an M.Sc. in chemistry from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He earned his Ph.D. in biophysics from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1974. Dr. Schlessinger was a postdoctoral fellow in the Departments of Chemistry and Applied Physics at Cornell University, and he was a visiting fellow in the immunology branch of the National Cancer Institute of NIH.
