About

Since becoming MIT’s 18th president in January 2023, Sally Kornbluth has rallied the community to help solve the great challenges of our time. Working closely with Chief Innovation and Strategy Officer Anantha Chandrakasan and Provost Cindy Barnhart, she has launched a series of initiatives inspired by the achievements and aspirations of Institute faculty. She created the Climate Project at MIT with the aim of driving technological, behavioral and policy solutions designed to help change the expected trajectory of global climate outcomes. In 2024, she introduced the MIT Human Insight Collaborative (MITHIC) to inspire new collaborations between MIT faculty in the arts, humanities, and social sciences and colleagues in other disciplines. And she led the launch of the MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative (MIT HEALS), designed to accelerate and deliver solutions, at scale, to society’s most urgent, intractable health challenges. 

In 2025, Kornbluth introduced the MIT Generative AI Impact Consortium to explore how gen AI can spawn transformative solutions for real-world challenges and help ensure that its societal impact is broadly beneficial. She has also championed the Institute’s commitment to freedom of expression, while making sure everyone remains free to do their best work – and that the great work of MIT continues.

A native of Fair Lawn, New Jersey, Kornbluth graduated from Williams College in 1982 with a BA in political science. Making a sharp pivot toward biology, she received a scholarship to attend Cambridge University, where she earned a BA in genetics in 1984. In 1989, Kornbluth received her PhD in molecular oncology from Rockefeller University, and then completed postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Diego. She joined Duke University in 1994 as an assistant professor of pharmacology and cancer biology, and by 2005 had risen to full professor. She stepped into administration the following year as vice dean for basic science at the Duke School of Medicine, a post she held until she became provost in 2014.

In her research, Kornbluth focused on processes that are key to understanding cancer as well as various degenerative disorders. She has published extensively on how cancer cells evade apoptosis and how metabolism regulates the cell death process. Among other honors, she is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

Kornbluth lives in Gray House with her husband, Daniel Lew, a professor in MIT’s Department of Biology. They have two grown children.