Jim Woodgett

Bio

Dr. Jim Woodgett is the President and Scientific Director of the Terry Fox Research Institute. He is also a Senior Scientist at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute at Sinai Health and Professor in the Department of Medical Biophysics, University of Toronto.

Dr. Woodgett received his Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1984 from the University of Dundee, Scotland and then pursued postdoctoral studies at the Salk Institute. He then set up a research group at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research at the Middlesex Hospital, London where he isolated and characterized the genes for several key cellular regulators including Glycogen Synthase Kinase-3 (GSK3), Protein Kinase B/Akt and the Stress-Activated Protein Kinases (JNKs). In 1992 he moved to the Ontario Cancer Institute in Toronto where his lab focused on the signal transduction mechanisms underscoring malignant growth, degenerative diseases and diabetes.  Dr. Woodgett is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute International Scholar as well as an MRC Scientist and CIHR Senior Investigator. His breast cancer research was supported via two separate Terry Fox New Frontiers Program Project Grants between 1999 and 2019.

Prior to becoming TFRI President and Scientific Director, Dr. Woodgett served as Director of Research at LTRI from 2005-2021. He was an inaugural member of the Advisory Board for the Institute of Cancer Research and has served as member or chair of a variety of grant panels in Canada and internationally. Of his 300+ publications to date, many relate to the biology and functions of GSK3 which was a topic of the last chapter of his PhD thesis, highlighting long timelines associated with pursuit of fundamental biological science. Over that time, he has trained over 50 students and fellows who have gone on to many interesting careers.