“We all worked hard, but I look back on it as being around a lot of fun, smart people,” said Anthony Letai, MD’95, PhD’93, the 18th Director of the National Cancer Institute.
Anthony Letai, MD’95, PhD’93, was sworn in as the 18th Director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) on September 29, 2025. He took the helm of the National Institutes of Health’s leading cancer research agency after serving as professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and medical oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
Letai is a physician-scientist with decades of experience studying cell death in cancer, developing treatments, and identifying predictive biomarkers—and he got his start at the University of Chicago.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in physics at Princeton University, Letai came to UChicago as a medical student and PhD candidate. In an interview, he recalled his medical training as an eye-opening and invigorating experience. “We were allowed to do a lot of things, and it was just a great experience. I can legitimately say it made me fall in love with the practice of medicine,” he said.
Letai also did his PhD work with Elaine Fuchs, PhD, an eminent cell biologist who served on the UChicago faculty for more than two decades and is now at Rockefeller University. He completed his thesis on the molecular basis of heritable blistering diseases with Fuchs, and credits her with giving him the confidence to stake out new scientific territory and pursue leadership roles.
After graduating from UChicago, he completed his residency in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. This was followed by a fellowship in hematology and oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, where his interest in cancer cell death evolved during his post-doctoral research training.
Since then, Letai’s career has focused on researching and treating hematological malignancies. His pioneering work in functional precision oncology helped advance therapies such as BCL-2 inhibitors—drugs that are now standard treatment for many adults with leukemia. His team also developed a technique that helps predict how cancer cells will respond to chemotherapies and has studied how harnessing cell death signaling can improve the effectiveness of current immunotherapies.
As he steps into his new leadership role at the NCI, reflected on his time in Chicago and the foundation it built for the rest of his career.
“We all worked hard, but I look back on it as being around a lot of fun, smart people. It made for an enjoyable experience for me,” he said.
“The University of Chicago has a very well-deserved reputation for intellectual rigor, and in my experience that penetrated the scientific as well as the medical part of my training,” he continued. “We were rigorously trained to understand why we were doing what we were doing, and I feel like UChicago prepared me extremely well to go into the next phase of my career.”
