Interim Dean, Geisel School of Medicine
Dr. Steven Leach currently serves as Professor of Molecular and Systems Biology, Surgery and Medicine at Dartmouth's Geisel School of Medicine, where he also serves as interim Dean. He formerly served as the Preston T. and Virginia R. Kelsey Distinguished Chair in Cancer, Associate Dean for Cancer Programs, and Director of the Dartmouth Cancer Center.
Dr. Leach received his bachelor's degree with high honors in Biology from Princeton University. He then completed medical school at Emory University, where he was a Robert Woodruff Fellow and member of the prestigious Alpha Omega Alpha medical honor society, followed by additional training at Yale University and M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in surgical oncology and cell biology. Prior to joining Dartmouth in 2017, he served as Assistant and Associate Professor of Surgery and Cell Biology at Vanderbilt University; Professor of Surgery, Oncology and Cell Biology at Johns Hopkins University; and was the inaugural Director of Memorial Sloan Kettering's Rubenstein Center for Pancreatic Cancer Research.
Dr. Leach has a long track record of cutting-edge research in the field of pancreatic cancer biology, and his team is known for establishing important links between pancreatic development and pancreatic cancer using both mouse and zebrafish model systems. More recently, his research team has completed large-scale genomic and transcriptomic mapping of the pancreatic cancer immune neoepitope landscape and has made important new discoveries in altered mRNA splicing as a new therapeutic target in this disease. Together with additional studies of pancreatic development and pancreatic epithelial plasticity, these findings have widened our understanding of both early and late events in human pancreatic cancer.
In addition to these scientific achievements, Dr. Leach also mentors graduate students, post-doctoral research fellows and junior faculty. To date, he has mentored a total of 33 students and postdoctoral research fellows, many of whom have gone on to achieve their own highly regarded faculty positions with NIH funding. Dr. Leach has been the principal investigator for multiple NIH R01, P01, P30, U01, S10 and T32 grants, and has received multiple awards honoring this work. In 2015 he was awarded Columbia University's Ruth Leff Seigel Award for national excellence in pancreatic cancer research, and in 2019 he was inducted as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Leach has previously served as Chair of the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network's Scientific and Medical Advisory Board, as Co-Editor in Chief for Current Opinion in Genetics and Development, and as a member of the Board of Trustees at Princeton University. At Dartmouth, he has been a champion for inclusive excellence, having received the Geisel School of Medicine's 2025 Martin Luther King, Jr. Legacy Award. In 2023, he was elected to the membership in the prestigious National Academy of Medicine and in 2025 was elected to membership of the American Academy of Science and Letters.