Anton Berns, PhD

Chairman

Anton is an internationally renowned cancer scientist. In 1999, he was appointed Director of Research and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the NKI and Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Hospital. He is elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Fellow of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), an honorary title granted to a select number of scientists whose work has proven to be of great importance for the advancement of cancer research. In 2016, he was elected as foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences of the US.

Anton currently heads a research group at NKI that excels in developing advanced, complex mouse models for cancer research. He obtained his PhD in biochemistry at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He joined the Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI) as a staff scientist in 1985. In 1986, he became head of the division of Molecular Genetics. From 1992-1994 he served as Vice President of Somatix Gene Therapy Corporation in the Bay Area where, under his guidance, cancer vaccines were produced.