Sawyers, an AACR member since 1997, was elected as a Fellow of the AACR Academy in 2014. Among his many contributions to the AACR, Sawyers served as the President of the AACR from 2013-2014 and as a member of the Board of Directors from 2003-2006. He conceptualized AACR Project GENIE and has served as chair of the AACR Project GENIE Steering Committee since its inception in 2015. He received the AACR-Princess Takamatsu Memorial Lectureship (2019); the AACR Team Science Award (2015); the Dorothy Landon-AACR Prize for Translational Medicine (2009); and the AACR-Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award (2005). Sawyers was associate editor for the AACR scientific journals Cancer Research (2000-2004) and Clinical Cancer Research (2002-2006). Additionally, Sawyers served as scientific editor for the AACR’s journal Cancer Discovery. He has served as program committee chair for the AACR Annual Meeting (2007); program committee chair for the AACR-NCI-EORTC Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics Symposium (2003); program director for the AACR Aspen Cancer Course (2004-2009, 2017); and course director for the AACR Molecular Biology in Clinical Oncology Workshop (2004-2008).

Sawyers has been recognized with a host of other honors and awards throughout his career, including being elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2014), National Academy of Sciences (2010), and the National Academy of Medicine (2008). He is a member of the National Cancer Advisory Board for the National Institutes of Health. He received the NCI Alfred G. Knudson Award in Cancer Genetics (2020); the STAT Biomedical Innovation Award (2019); the Scheele Award from the Swedish Academy of Pharmaceutical Sciences (2017); the American Cancer Society Medal of Honor for Clinical Research (2017); the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2013); the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award (2009); the Emil J Freireich Award for Clinical Research from MD Anderson Cancer Center (2007); the David A. Karnofsky Memorial Award from the American Society of Clinical Oncology (2005); the Freedom-to-Discover Research Award in Cancer from Bristol-Myers Squibb; the Doris Duke Distinguished Clinical Scientist Award (2001); and the Stohlman Scholar Award from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (2000).

Sawyers received his medical degree from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1985. He completed his internship and residency in internal medicine at the University of California, San Francisco in 1988, and completed a fellowship in hematology and oncology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1991. Sawyers was a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA/HHMI from 1989 to1993.


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