Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus, MD, to Deliver 2026 Commencement Address
Introduction
The University of Illinois College of Medicine is proud to share that Harold Varmus, MD will serve as commencement speaker at its 144th ceremony, held Friday, May 8, 2026 at Credit Union 1 Arena.
Dr. Varmus is currently the Lewis Thomas University Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and a senior associate at the New York Genome Center. He is the author of The Art and Politics of Science, his memoir published in 2009, and a preeminent voice in cancer research.
In 1989, Dr. Varmus and his co-recipient Dr. Michael Bishop received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the groundbreaking identification of a large family of genes—now called oncogenes—can transform a normal cell into a tumor cell and result in cancer. This research has had an immense influence on our understanding of tumor development, and has augmented our knowledge of the complicated signal systems which govern the normal growth of cells.
In addition to his cancer research, Dr. Varmus also served as director of the National Institutes of Health from 1993-1999, president and CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center from 2000-2010, and director of the National Cancer Institute from 2010-2015.
Dr. Varmus graduated from Amherst College with a Bachelor of Arts in English literature and subsequently earned a Master's of Arts in English from Harvard in 1962. After graduating from Harvard, Dr. Varmus entered medical school at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. As an alternative to serving in the Vietnam War, he joined the Public Health Service at the National Institutes of Health in 1968 researching the regulation of bacterial gene expression by cyclic AMP, an intracellular signaling molecule. In 1970, he joined the Biship lab at University of California, San Francisco, a move which ultimately led to his receipt of the Nobel.
In addition to his work in research, Dr. Varmus is a policy advisor, advocate for equality and inclusion within biomedical sciences, and co-developer of PubMed Central, a public digital library of full-length scientific reports. He is a co-founder and former leader of the Public Library of Science, a not-for-profit publisher of open access journals. He serves on the Global Health Advisory Board at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Scientific Advisory Board of the Borad Institute at Harvard and MIT, and chairs advisory groups for the Faculty of 1000 and the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health.