Robert B. Darnell

Robert B. Darnell
Darnell lecturing in 2010
Born	Robert Bernard Darnell (1957-10-29) October 29, 1957 (age 59) Washington, D.C.
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Columbia College, Columbia University, Washington University School of Medicine, Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, Weill Cornell Medical College, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
Spouse(s)	Jennifer Eve Cordes (m. 1987; 4 children)
Awards	National Academy of Science in 2014 Institute of Medicine in 2010
Scientific career
Fields	Neurooncology Neuroscience Immunology
Doctoral advisor	Robert G. Roeder

Robert Darnell is an American neurooncologist and neuroscientist, the founding director and CEO of the New York Genome Center, the Robert and Harriet Heilbrunn Professor of Cancer Biology at The Rockefeller University, and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His research into rare autoimmune brain diseases led to the invention of the HITS-CLIP method to study RNA regulation, and he is developing ways to explore the regulatory portions—known as the “dark matter”—of the human genome.

At The Rockefeller University Darnell is Head of the Laboratory of Molecular Neuro-Oncology, and Senior Physician at the Rockefeller University Hospital, has been an HHMI Investigator since 1992, and an Adjunct Attending Neuro-Oncologist at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He was named to the New York Genome Center position on November 28, 2012.

Darnell’s early research was concentrated on paraneoplastic syndromes (PNDs, the Paraneoplastic Neurologic Disorders), disorders touching on various clinical and basic aspects of biology including Cancer immunology, Neuroimmunology. He was the first to definitively demonstrate that naturally occurring tumor immunity in humans was caused by antigen-specific cytotoxic (CD8+) T cells, helping to generate the foundation for the field of immuno-oncology. His lab was the first to use PND patient antisera to screen expression cDNA libraries to identify the genes encoding the PND antigens. This opened the door to the cloning of the Nova, cdr2 and Elavl (Hu) antigens, and led Darnell to hypothesize, based on the intracellular nature of the antigens, that tumor immunity was mediated not by antibodies but by T cells. His laboratory went on to prove this hypothesis, demonstrating cdr2-specific CD*+ T cells were present in the peripheral blood and cerebrospinal fluid of patients with paraneoplastic cerebellar degeneration associated with tumor immunity to breast or ovarian cancers.