Downing Lab Team

Dr. James R. Downing is the president and chief executive officer of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. He is an architect of the expansion of St. Jude clinical care and research programs in Memphis and around the globe. Dr. Downing is a critical contributor in markedly improving the cure rates of children with ALL, making a series of seminal discoveries that unraveled mechanisms of leukemogenesis and drug resistance. Dr. Downing was instrumental in launching the Pediatric Cancer Genome Project, which sequenced the normal and cancer genomes of over 800 pediatric patients and transformed the broader field of genomic medicine. Dr. Downing’s decades-long career at St. Jude has been highlighted by paradigm-shifting discovery and remarkable accomplishment.