Members

Xandra Breakefield, Ph.D., is a research scientist with a strong background in molecular genetics and neuroscience. She has focused on: identification of neurologic disease genes, gene therapy for neurologic diseases; and the role of extracellular vesicles (EVs) in cell-to-cell communication and tumor progression. She has published over 500 scientific articles and has received continuous support from the National Institutes of Health in the USA for her research over a 40 year period.

She did her undergraduate work at Wilson College and her graduate work in Microbial Genetics at Georgetown University. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow with Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Marshall Nirenberg at the NIH. She was appointed an Assistant Professor in the first Department of Human Genetics in the USA at Yale Medical School in 1974 and moved in 1984 to Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. She is currently Professor of Neurology in the Neuroscience Program at Harvard Medical School and Geneticist in the Neurology and Radiology Services at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Professor Breakefield has received a number of awards for her work, including a McKnight Foundation Neuroscience Development Award, two Javits Neuroscience Investigator Awards, the Society for Neuroscience Mika Salpeter Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Harvard Medical School William Silen Lifetime Achievement Mentoring Award. She is a current recipient of an Outstanding Investigator Award from the National Cancer Institute, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and past president of the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy.