Nikola Panayot Pavletich is the former chair of structural biology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.^[1]

Pavletich received his BS in chemistry from Caltech in 1988 and his PhD in molecular biology and genetics from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1991.^[2] He did a postdoc at MIT with Carl Pabo.

He joined the faculty at Sloan Kettering in 1993 and was named chair of the Structural Biology Program in 2003.^[3] He has been an HHMI investigator since 1997.

His laboratory researches malignant cell growth and DNA damage contributing to the development of cancer. DNA damage repair is a significant factor in whether a cell will become cancerous after genetic insult. Some of his major focuses have been the mTOR pathway and BRCA1. His lab uses x-ray crystallography to determine how proteins interact.^[4][3]

• 1994 – Pew Scholar ^[5]
• 1995 – Beckman Young Investigators Award^[6]
• 1999 – MIT Innovators under 35^[7]
• 2000 – AACR Award for Outstanding Achievement in Cancer Research
• 2003 – Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research
• 2012 – Elected member of the National Academy of Sciences^[3]
• 2014 – Elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences^[8]
• 2015 – Elected member of the Institute of Medicine^[9]
• Cornelius P. Rhoads Memorial Award, American Association for Cancer Research
• DuPont-Merck Young Investigator Award, The Protein Society