Siddhartha Mukherjee

Siddhartha Mukherjee was born on July 21, 1970, in New Delhi, India, and is an Indian-American physician, oncologist, biologist, and author. He attended Stanford University for his undergraduate biology degree, then pursued a D.Phil. at Magdalen College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and earned his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 2000. Mukherjee joined the faculty of Columbia University Medical Center in 2009, where he investigates hematopoietic stem cells and cancer therapy. His first major book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (2010), traced the history of cancer from ancient Egypt through the era of targeted therapy. The work won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and was named by Time magazine among the 100 most influential nonfiction books in English since 1923. His subsequent books, The Laws of Medicine (2015), The Gene: An Intimate History (2016), and The Song of the Cell (2022), have continued his mission to render complex science accessible and emotionally resonant. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times. In 2014, the Government of India awarded him the Padma Shri, its fourth-highest civilian honor. In 2025, Mukherjee co-founded Manas AI, an AI-enabled drug discovery startup.