Rakesh Kumar, PhD

Professor Rakesh Kumar is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Breast Cancer in Young Women Foundation (USA) and the Founding Scientific Director of the Young Women’s Breast Cancer Research Institute (USA). He holds the International Endowed Chair Professorship and the Emeritus Distinguished Professorship at the Swami Rama Himalayan University, India, and serves as an Adjunct or Visiting Professor at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, VCU School of Medicine (USA), and Medanta Cancer Institute, Medanta-MediCity (India).

In 2023, Professor Kumar founded the Breast Cancer in Young Women Foundation, a national nonprofit charity in the US with team members from more than 35 countries — all dedicated to advancing targeted awareness, research, education, and advocacy addressing the unique challenges of breast cancer in young women. In 2024, he launched the first peer-reviewed, open-access international journal dedicated exclusively to this field, the Journal of Young Women’s Breast Cancer and Health. In 2025, he launched the Youth Council for Breast Health to promote targeted awareness of breast cancer and breast health on educational campuses. In 2026, he founded the Young Women’s Breast Cancer Research Institute to reframe breast cancer in young women through early biology research. More recently, he served as a lead editor of an upcoming book on Early Onset Breast Cancer published by Springer Nature, featuring contributions from leading global experts in young women’s breast cancer.

Professor Kumar has devoted more than four decades to innovative cancer research, translational oncology, and academic leadership, serving on the faculties of leading medical schools, universities, and comprehensive cancer centers in the United States, including Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

His academic journey began with a master’s degree in chemistry from Bareilly College in 1976, followed by graduate training at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, in 1984, where he briefly served as a Research Officer. In January 1986, he relocated to New York City to pursue postdoctoral research in cancer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and subsequently joined its faculty in 1988. Over a distinguished career spanning over four decades, Professor Kumar has held numerous academic and leadership positions, including faculty member, tenured professor, endowed distinguished professor, department vice-chair and chair, endowed chair professor, multiple institutional research and academic leadership positions, and the Government of India DBT National Chair in Cancer Research with a Distinguished Professorship.

Professor Kumar has made seminal conceptual, mechanistic, and translational contributions to cancer biology and breast cancer tumor biology, particularly in the areas of the epidermal growth factor receptor, kinase signaling, chromatin biology, and gene regulation. During his collaborative studies with the late John Mendelsohn, inventor of cetuximab, his research provided critical mechanistic insights into the actions of the monoclonal antibodies C225 (anti-EGFR) and 4D5 (anti-HER2), which were later humanized and developed into the landmark therapeutics Cetuximab and Herceptin, respectively. His laboratory has discovered, cloned, and characterized approximately 20 genes and established the PAK and MTA families as important regulators in cancer biology and metastasis research. Collectively, his work has opened new directions in cancer research, identified novel therapeutic targets, and trained 67 students, postdoctoral fellows, and physician-scientists, many of whom now hold tenured professorships and senior leadership positions at major academic and research institutions in the United States, India, China, Italy, and other countries.

Professor Kumar has authored more than 300 peer-reviewed research articles and invited reviews, edited ten scholarly books and volumes, delivered more than 300 invited lectures worldwide, and served (and is serving) on the editorial boards of leading cancer research journals for over 25 years. His research has appeared on the covers of 18 scientific journals and on two annual reports from the MD Anderson Cancer Center. Over the past five years, Stanford University’s global citation analyses have consistently ranked him among the top 0.4% of scientists worldwide in oncology and carcinogenesis.

He has also contributed extensively to the scientific peer-review process, serving on more than 100 national and international grant review panels over three decades. These include memberships in multiple study sections at the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense, the Veterans Administration, the Komen Foundation, Metavivors, and many other organizations in the United States; multiple international governmental funding agencies; DBT–Wellcome Trust initiatives; India–France and India–Germany bilateral funding programs; major breast cancer foundations; and national scientific initiatives, such as the Indian National Breast Cancer Genome Project and the Government of India’s Making Cancer Care Affordable Project.

Professor Kumar has received numerous national and international honors throughout his career. Notable honors include the 1995 Outstanding Investigator Award from the Hinkle Society of Penn State University College of Medicine; the 2004 Dallas/Fort Worth Living Legend Faculty Achievement Award from MD Anderson Cancer Center; the 2004 Norman Brinker Award for Research Excellence; the 2006 Ranbaxy (Sun Pharma) Research Award in Pharmaceutical Sciences; and the 2013 Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Association of Indian Scientists in Cancer Research. He is a member or lifetime member of multiple professional associations, including more than 35 years of membership with and/or service for the American Association for Cancer Research.