Charles L. Sawyers is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and has served as Chair of the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center since 2006, where he studies mechanisms of cancer drug resistance with an eye toward developing novel therapies. He co-discovered the antiandrogen drug enzalutamide that was approved by the FDA in 2012 for treatment of advanced prostate cancer. He shared the 2009 Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for the development of the ABL kinase inhibitor imatinib for patients with chronic myeloid leukemia and the second generation ABL inhibitor dasatinib to overcome imatinib resistance and received the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences in 2013. Sawyers is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and past President of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). He co-founded AACR Project GENIE, an international consortium of cancer centers who share genomic and clinical data from patients treated at their respective clinical sites, for which he received the 2021 AACR Distinguished Public Service Award. He served on the US National Cancer Advisory (2012-2020) and the Board of Directors of Novartis (2013-2025).