Jill Bargonetti, Ph.D. is a native New Yorker who attended Hunter College Elementary School and High School and then transferred to the Bronx High School of Science. She earned her B.A. at the State University of New York College at Purchase and her Ph.D. at New York University and postdoctoral work at Columbia University. She serves as chair of the Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology subprogram of the Ph.D. Program in Biology at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) and as professor of biological sciences at the CUNY Graduate Center, Hunter College and Weill Cornell Medical College. Since 1994, she has led the Bargonetti cancer biology laboratory, where her team is using genetically engineered tools to research breast cancer and other cancers.
Her areas of cancer expertise are on the p53 and MDM2/MDMX pathways and their relationships to cancer biology. She has 31 years of research experience with mutant p53 (mtp53), being a member of the group that first identified that oncogenic mtp53 lost its site-specific DNA binding ability. She has published research in prestigious scientific journals including Cell, Nature, Genes and Development, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Cancer Research. She has served as a standing member of the Tumor Cell Biology study section grant review panel for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from 2012 to 2018. She was a member of the National Cancer Policy Board from 2002-2005.
She has received research grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, the American Cancer Society, and the Department of Defense. She has been honored by the U.S. government as an innovator in the education of minorities in science. Her awards include the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, from President Bill Clinton; the New York City Mayor’s Award for Excellence in Science and Technology; the New York Voice Award (given to those who have made a significant improvement to the quality of life in New York City); the Kathy Keeton Mountain Top Award from the New York branch of the NAACP; the Outstanding Woman Scientist Award from the Association for Women in Science; the NYU Graduate School of Arts and Science and SUNY Purchase Outstanding Alumnae Achievement Awards and has been named to the Bronx High School of Science Hall of Fame. She was profiled by Working Mother magazine as one of the nation’s “Stellar Moms.” She is also working on integrating science education and movement and has developed a Hunter College course called “Choreographing Genomics”.
Her scientific work is currently funded by the Breast Cancer Research Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
