Keith Flaherty

Director of Clinical Research; Professor of Medicine

Dr. Keith T. Flaherty is an American medical oncologist specializing in targeted therapy for melanoma. He is Director of Clinical Research at the Mass General Cancer Center, holder of the Richard Saltonstall Endowed Chair in Oncology, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and an associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He studied neurobiology at Yale University, received his medical degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1997, completed internal medicine residency at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and a fellowship in hematology and medical oncology at the University of Pennsylvania. His work established the efficacy of BRAF inhibition, MEK inhibition, and combined BRAF/MEK inhibition in metastatic melanoma, and he led the early clinical trials of vemurafenib. He served as Editor-in-Chief of Clinical Cancer Research from 2016 to 2025, was elected a Fellow of the AACR Academy in 2023, and was elected President of the American Association for Cancer Research for 2026-2027.