Kornelia Polyak

Kornelia Polyak is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and breast cancer scientist.

Polyak earned her MD from Albert Szent-Gyorgyi Medical University in Szeged, Hungary, and her PhD from Cornell University/Sloan-Kettering in New York City. She then did a fellowship in cancer genetics at Johns Hopkins Hospital with Bert Vogelstein and Kenneth Kinzler.

In 1998, Polyak joined the faculty Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Her research focuses on the genomics of breast cancer and cell profiling in cancer. Her research is funded in part by the Breast Cancer Research Foundation.

From 2010 to 2013, she served on the American Association for Cancer Research Board of Directors, and from 2015 to 2019, she was a member of the AACR Women in Cancer Research council.

• 2008 Elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation
• 2011 Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research
• 2012 AACR Outstanding Investigator Award