About the President

Peter M. Howley, M.D.
President

M. Howley, M.D. is the Shattuck Professor of Pathological Anatomy at Harvard Medical School, where he chairs the Department of the Pathology.  He moved to Harvard in 1993 after twenty years at the NIH where he was the Chief of the Laboratory of Tumor Virus Biology of the National Cancer Institute.  Dr. Howley has an A.B. in Chemistry from Princeton University (1968), an M.M.S. from Rutgers Medical School (1970) and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School (1972).  He is boarded in Anatomic Pathology and did residency training at Massachusetts General Hospital and at the NCI.

Dr. Howley's research involves the papillomaviruses, and in particular the role of HPV in cervical cancer.  His work has involved determining the mechanisms by which HPVs contribute to cancer.  He has studied the viral oncogenes encoded by the cancer associated HPVs and discovered that they function by inactivating the cellular tumor suppressor genes p53 and pRB.  These studies led to the identification of p53 as a substrate of the ubiquitin pathway and the discovery of the E6 associated protein (E6AP) as the first mammalian ubiquitin protein ligase.  His current research deals with papillomavirus virus-host cell interactions and a further understanding of the molecular pathways involved in HPV associated carcinogenesis.

Dr. Howley has been recognized by the Wallace P. Rowe Award from the NIAID, the Warner-Lambert/Parke-Davis and Rous-Whipple Awards from the American Society for Investigative Pathology, and the Paul Ehrlich-Ludwig Darmstaedter Award (shared with Harald zur Hausen) from Germany. He received a MERIT award from the NCI in 2000.  Dr. Howley is a member of National Academy of Sciences (1993), the Institute of Medicine (1994) and the American Academy of Arts and Science (1996). He is a co-editor of two textbooks (Fields Virology and The Molecular Basis of Cancer) and serves as a co-editor of the recently established Annual Review of Pathology: Mechanisms of Disease. He was the President of the American Society of Virology from 1998 to 1999, currently serves as the President of the American Society of Investigative Pathology.