Congratulations to Distinguished Professor Eileen White on her election to the National Academy of Sciences!
Eileen White is a cancer biologist known for her work establishing that a DNA tumor virus oncogene functions by inhibiting programmed cell death by apoptosis and is a homologue of the human BCL-2 oncogene. She is also known for establishing that tumor cells induce intracellular nutrient scavenging by autophagy, which promotes their metabolism, growth, survival, and malignancy. She was born and grew up on Long Island, New York, and received a B. S. degree in biology from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1977 and a Ph. D. degree in Biology from SUNY Stony Brook in 1983. She was a Damon Runyon Postdoctoral Fellow and Staff Investigator at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, then moved to Rutgers University where she contributed to the establishment of the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey. She is currently the Deputy Director, Chief Scientific Officer, and Associate Director of Basic Research at the Rutgers Cancer Institute and is Associate Director of the Ludwig Princeton Branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research at Princeton University. In addition to being elected to the National Academy of Sciences, she is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Microbiology.