Nikola Panayot Pavletich is the former chair of structural biology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
[1] Pavletich received his BS in chemistry from Caltech in 1988 and his PhD in molecular biology and genetics from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1991.
He joined the faculty at Sloan Kettering in 1993 and was named chair of the Structural Biology Program in 2003.
His laboratory researches malignant cell growth and DNA damage contributing to the development of cancer.
DNA damage repair is a significant factor in whether a cell will become cancerous after genetic insult.