Charles L. Sawyers (born 1959) is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator who holds the Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Chair of the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program (HOPP) at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK).

HOPP is a program created in 2006 that comprises researchers from many disciplines to bridge clinical and laboratory discoveries.

[4] He became a HHMI investigator in 2002 while working at UCLA's Jonsson Cancer Center.

[5] Sawyers works on molecularly targeted cancer drugs, with a focus on developing a new generation of treatment options for patients.

He shared the 2009 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award with Brian J. Druker and Nicholas Lydon,[6] for the development of the ABL kinase inhibitor imatinib for patients with chronic myeloid leukemia and the second-generation ABL inhibitor dasatinib to overcome imatinib resistance.