Joan Brugge is currently Director of the Ludwig Center at Harvard Medical School. She joined the faculty of the Harvard Medical School as a Professor in July 1997. A graduate of Northwestern University, she did her graduate work at the Baylor College of Medicine, completing her PhD in 1975. She then performed her postdoctoral training at the University of Colorado with Raymond Erikson. Brugge has held full professorships at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, and the University of Pennsylvania, where she was also named as an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. From 1992-1997 Brugge was Scientific Director of the biotechnology company ARIAD. She then joined the faculty at Harvard in 1997 as Professor of Cell Biology, and was Chair of Cell Biology from 2004 to 2014. Brugge has received several awards recognizing her scientific accomplishments including an NIH Merit Award, an American Cancer Society Research Professorship and the Senior Career Recognition Award from the American Society of Cell Biology, and she has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine.