Dr. Bruce Stillman is President of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on the north shore of Long Island in New York.  A native of Australia, he obtained a Bachelor of Science degree with honors at Sydney University and a Ph. D. at the John Curtin School of Medical Research at the Australian National University. He then moved to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as a Postdoctoral Fellow in 1979 and has been at the Laboratory ever since, being promoted to the scientific staff in 1981.  Dr. Stillman has been Director of the Cancer Center at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory since 1992, a position he still holds.  In 1994, he succeeded Dr. James D. Watson as Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and was appointed President in 2003.

Dr. Stillman's research focuses on the mechanism and regulation of duplication of DNA and chromatin in cells, a process that ensures accurate inheritance of genetic information from one cell generation to the next.

 For these research accomplishments, Dr. Stillman has received a number of honors including election as a Fellow of The Royal Society in 1993.  In 1994, Dr. Stillman was awarded the Julian Wells Medal (Australia) and in 1999, Dr. Stillman was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for service to scientific research.  Dr. Stillman was elected in 2000 to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. In 2004, Dr. Stillman was awarded the Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. Prize from the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation with Dr. Thomas Kelly. In 2006 he received the American Cancer Society Basic Science Award from the Society of Surgical Oncology. He has also received three honorary doctorates.