Former Executive Director and CSO, the Children’s Mercy Research Institute & Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine, Professor of Cancer Biology in the University of Kansas School of Medicine, MO, USA
Latest activity: Dr Curran established and led the Children’s Mercy Research Institute in Kansas, MO, raising more than $300M to build a new research facility and recruit a range of faculty. He was appointed Executive Director and Chief Scientific Officer, and as the Donald J. Hall Eminent Scholar in Pediatric Research. He was also appointed a Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine, as a Professor of Cancer Biology in the University of Kansas School of Medicine.
Dr Curran served as President of the American Association of Cancer Research in 2001 and on the Board of Scientific Advisors of the National Cancer Institute from 2000-2005. In 2005, he was elected to the Royal Society, in 2009 he was elected to the Institute of Medicine, of the National Academies, in 2012 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2020 as a Corresponding Fellow to the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Dr. Curran has received several awards and honors including, the Passano Foundation Young Scientist Award in 1992, the Outstanding Achievement in Cancer Research award from the AACR in 1993, the Golgi Award from the Camillo Golgi Foundation and the Italian Academy of Neurosciences in 1994, and the Fred Epstein Lifetime Achievement Award from the Children’s Brain Tumor Foundation in 2015. He was ranked fourth among High Impact Researchers in Molecular Biology and Genetics, 1988-92, based on citation impact by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)
Dr. Curran’s research spans the fields of cancer, signal transduction, genomics and neurobiology. He discovered and characterized the inducible Fos-Jun oncogenic transcription factor complex and demonstrated its function in diverse signal transduction processes. He also identified reelin, the gene responsible for the classic ataxic mouse mutation, reeler, and determined its role in the control of neuronal migration in the developing brain. Over the course of the last two decades, he pioneered the preclinical analysis of Hedgehog Pathway inhibitors for the treatment of pediatric medulloblastoma and transitioned this work into successful Phase I/II human clinical trials. His worked is published in over 300 papers that have been cited more than 75,000 times.