Stephen Robbins

Stephen M. Robbins is the Director of the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research at the Jewish General Hospital, Glaxo Smith Kline Chair in Pharmacology and Professor in the Gerald Bronfman Department of Oncology at McGill University. In 2013 he was appointed as the Scientific Director of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Institute of Cancer Research and served two terms (2013-2022).

He completed his undergraduate degree at York University in 1985 and then completed his PhD in 1991 at the University of British Columbia in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology. From 2009-2013 he was the Director of the Southern Alberta Cancer Research Institute and was the Associate Director Research for Alberta Health Services Cancer Care. In addition to serving as the Scientific Director of ICR he was the Chair (2020-2022) of Governing Council for the International Agency for Research on Cancer (Lyon, France) and past Chair of the Canadian Cancer Research Alliance.

Dr. Robbins has had a long-standing interest in understanding the biochemical circuitry that controls cellular proliferation and differentiation and how this circuitry goes awry in cancer. During his research career he has taken a more translational approach including defining new therapies for malaria, has discovered a novel class of anti-inflammatory agents and identified new therapeutic targets for brain tumours.