Mukherjee, Siddhartha

Siddhartha Mukherjee (Bengali: সিদ্ধার্থ মুখার্জী; born 21 July 1970) is an Indian physician, biologist, and author. His first book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (2010), won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, and Guardian First Book Award, among other awards. It was listed in the "All-Time 100 Nonfiction Books" (the 100 most influential books of the last century) by Time magazine in 2011. He followed it with The Gene: An Intimate History (2016), which was among The New York Times 100 best books of 2016, and a finalist for the Wellcome Trust Prize and the Royal Society Prize for Science Books. He won the 2019 Lewis Thomas Prize. After completing secondary school education in India, Mukherjee studied biology at Stanford University, obtained a D.Phil. from University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and an M.D. from Harvard University. He joined New York–Presbyterian Hospital / Columbia University Medical Center in New York City in 2009. As of 2018, he is an associate professor of medicine in the Division of Hematology and Oncology. Featured in the Time 100 list of most influential people in 2011, Mukherjee writes for The New Yorker and is a columnist in The New York Times. He is described as part of a select group of doctor-writers (such as Oliver Sacks and Atul Gawande) who have "transformed the public discourse on human health," and allowed a generation of readers a rare and intimate glimpse into the life of science and medicine. His research concerns the physiology of cancer cells, immunological therapy for blood cancers, and the discovery of bone- and cartilage-forming stem cells in the vertebrate skeleton. The government of India conferred on him its fourth highest civilian award, the Padma Shri, in 2014.