W. Kimryn Rathmell, MD, PhD, is chief executive officer of The James Cancer Hospital and Solove Research Institute and director of The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center, a role she assumed in May 2025.
She holds the inaugural Jeri B. Block and Robert H. Schottenstein Distinguished Chair in Cancer, the largest endowed chair ever established at Ohio State, and oversees the clinical and research excellence of both The James and the comprehensive cancer center. A leading expert in the translational research and treatment of complex and hereditary kidney cancers, Dr. Rathmell has pioneered basic science investigation into the biological diversity of these tumors and the mechanisms that drive them. She joined Ohio State from the National Cancer Institute, where she served as the 17th director from December 2023 to January 2025.
During her NCI tenure she launched PROSPECT-Lung, the first pragmatic trial initiated under the institute’s Clinical Trials Innovation Unit, and the Early-Onset Cancer Initiative addressing the rising incidence of early-onset cancers.
Before leading the NCI, Dr. Rathmell was a professor of medicine and biochemistry at Vanderbilt University, where she served as physician-in-chief of Vanderbilt University Medical Center and chair of the Department of Medicine from 2020 to 2023. She previously held faculty positions at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, leading a clinical and translational trials program in kidney cancer. Her research has produced more than 300 articles in leading peer-reviewed journals, including The New England Journal of Medicine, Nature, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
An elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, the Association of American Physicians, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Society of Clinical Oncology, and served as president of the American Society for Clinical Investigation in 2019. Dr. Rathmell earned her medical and doctoral degrees from Stanford University and later completed a Master of Management in Health Care at the Vanderbilt University Owen Graduate School of Management.