Translated by DeepL
Kornelia Polyak, MD, PhD, is one of the leading international figures in contemporary breast cancer research.
The ceremony to confer an honorary doctorate from ULiège, followed by a lecture by Kornelia Polyak, will take place on November 25, 2026 as part of the “ : ULiège’s Major Academic Lectures .”
A professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, a researcher at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and co-director of the Cancer Cell Biology program at the Harvard Cancer Consortium, she has devoted most of her career to understanding the molecular, cellular, and evolutionary basis of breast cancer. Her translational research has always been guided by theultimate goalof improving clinical care for patients. Her areas of expertise include the evolution of breast tumors, their heterogeneity, and the factors driving metastatic progression and treatment resistance.
Trained in medicine and cancer biology, Kornelia Polyak earned her medical degree from Albert Szent-Györgyi Medical University in Hungary, followed by a Ph.D. at the highly prestigious Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences / Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, in Joan Massague’s laboratory. She then continued her training in cancer genetics at the Johns Hopkins Oncology Center (Baltimore, MA), notably under Bert Vogelstein and Kenneth Kinzler, two leading figures in molecular oncology. This training, at the intersection of medicine, genetics, and molecular biology, has shaped her scientific approach throughout her career: basic research consistently focused on understanding the mechanisms of cancer with clinical relevance. Her work at Sloan Kettering and Johns Hopkins attracted the attention of Professor Livingston, among others, who is world-renowned for his understanding of the biological function of the BRCA1 gene, a gene associated with susceptibility to breast and ovarian cancers. She was then hired as a principal investigator in 1998 at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and at Harvard Medical School. Her work there has profoundly contributed to a renewed understanding of breast cancers as heterogeneous, dynamic, and evolving diseases. One of her major contributions is the demonstration of the interactive nature of breast tumors: they should not be understood solely as masses of cancer cells carrying mutations, but rather as complex ecosystems composed of different cell populations interacting with their microenvironment. Her research thus focuses on intratumoral heterogeneity, clonal evolution, interactions between cancer cells and immune cells, as well as the mechanisms leading to metastatic progression and treatment resistance. Her work has demonstrated the importance of intratumoral heterogeneity for risk assessment and the identification of new therapeutic targets, as well as the role of the immune microenvironment in cancer progression.
Her research areas are structured around three main themes: the prediction and prevention of breast cancer risk; the identification of mechanisms underlying tumor evolution, metastatic progression, and treatment resistance; and the discovery of new therapeutic targets for particularly aggressive forms of cancer, notably triple-negative and inflammatory breast cancers.
Kornelia Polyak’s exceptional scientific career is evidenced by an H-index of 101 and more than 67,000 citations of her work. It is also highlighted by numerous honors and awards. She has received the Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research, the AACR (American Association for Cancer Research) Outstanding Investigator Award for Breast Cancer Research, the Rosalind E. Franklin Award for Women in Science, and the NCI (National Cancer Institute) Outstanding Investigator Award in 2015 and 2022. She was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2019, a member of the AACR Academy in 2020, then a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine in 2022, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2024. She was also named an American Cancer Society Research Professor in 2022 and, in 2023, received the AACR Distinguished Lectureship in Breast Cancer Research at the highly renowned San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, a veritable mecca for researchers and clinicians working on breast cancer.
Kornelia Polyak thus possesses a scientific profile of the very highest caliber. Her career combines academic excellence, methodological innovation, potential clinical impact, and international recognition at the highest level. Over the course of her career, she has mentored numerous doctoral students, clinician-researchers, and no fewer than 50 postdoctoral fellows (some of whom have in turn become renowned scientists, such as Prof. Ian Krop, now a professor at Yale) from around the world, including one from Liège between 2019 and 2023.
For these reasons, the conferral of an honorary doctorate from our University, with which she collaborates, seems the natural culmination of a scientific career that is both prolific and inspiring.
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