Laurie Glimcher

Laurie Hollis Glimcher is an American physician-scientist who was appointed president and CEO of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in October 2016. She was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019.

In February 2016, Laurie Glimcher was named the next president and CEO of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Glimcher was considered for the position for the Dean of Harvard Medical School but turned the position down in order to become the president of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. At Dana-Farber, Glimcher is collaborating on research which strives to find methods of combatting cancer from within the human immune system. The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute is an institution that is affiliated with Harvard, as it currently is one of its teaching hospitals. Glimcher, who was the first female dean of any medical school in New York state, became the first female to lead the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Glimcher's research has focused on the immune system; she is known for early work with T cell differentiation, her discovery that Schnurri-3 regulates osteoblasts which led to a collaboration with Merck & Co., and her discovery of the role played by XBP-1 in lipogenesis and the unfolded protein response. Glimcher's role helped discover Schnurri-3 (Shn3 for short) is a large zinc finger protein distantly related to Drosophila. Shn is a potent and essential regulator of adult bone formation. Her research has had implications for understanding asthma, HIV, inflammatory bowel disease, and osteoporosis, and around 2016, on cancer immunotherapy.

Her eldest son, Dr. Hugh Glimcher Auchincloss, is also a physician, who was in training as a cardiothoracic surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital in 2016. Her younger son, Jake Auchincloss, is a cybersecurity professional and a Newton, Massachusetts City Counselor-at-large following service as an infantry officer in the Marine Corps.

From October 2015 to February 2016, Glimcher was the target of eight protests by animal rights activists angered by New York Blood Center's abandonment of 66 chimpanzees that had been used in medical research; Glimcher was a member of the board of directors, which had voted to stop paying for care of the chimpanzees before she joined it.

Glimcher received the L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science in 2014 for her work in the field of immunology and her research regarding the control of immune responses. She received the Steven C. Beering Award in 2015. In 2018, she received the American Association of Immunologists Lifetime Achievement Award.

From 2012 to 2016, Glimcher served as the Stephen and Suzanne Weiss Dean of Weill Cornell Medical College and the Cornell University Provost for Medical Affairs.

Glimcher served on the 2005 Larry Summers Task Force for Women in Science and Engineering, where she expressed her disappointment in the rate of progress for women in science. She joined this task force after a controversy was sparked when former Harvard president Larry Summers suggested that women might be able to innately do less in science. Although she was on the Larry Summers committee, Glimcher still believes that there is still more work to be done. She was quoted as saying: "There are not enough women in senior leadership positions, period. It hasn't gotten a heck of a lot better since I was in medical school." After she was appointed to Cornell's medical school she immediately made changes regarding women's rights. She established paid maternity leave, created daycare centers and another postdoc grant program for primary caregivers. Upon arriving at Cornell there were 0 out of 19 clinical department chairs filled by women; as of today there are 2.

She joined the board of directors of Bristol-Myers Squibb in 1997 and retired from the board in 2017. Her research laboratory received funding from Merck & Co for a project focused on developing new therapies for the treatment of osteoporosis in 2008.

From 1991 to 2011, Glimcher was the Irene Heinz Given Professor of Immunology at the Harvard School of Public Health, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Clinically, she is a specialist in osteoporosis.

The New York Blood Center had funded a Liberian lab since 1974 where the chimps had been used for testing of different viruses. The New York Blood Center ended their funding of the Liberian lab in March 2015.

Glimcher graduated from the Winsor School, an all-girls private school in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1968. In 1972, she graduated magna cum laude from Radcliffe College and graduated cum laude from Harvard Medical School in 1976.