Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Dr. Sellers is a core member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a senior advisor to the president for experimental therapeutics at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and a professor of medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. He is widely recognized for his groundbreaking findings in cancer genomics and therapeutic drug discovery and his research that homes in on the functions of tumor suppressor genes and oncogenes and cancer's molecular pathways through the use of high-throughput genetic sequencing and other methods.

In the early 2000s, Dr. Meyerson, who is also a member of the Broad Institute and is currently the director of the Center for Cancer Genome Discovery at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, partnered with Dr. Sellers on a gene sequencing project. “Bill and I were talking about cancer genomes, and he said, ‘We should sequence the kinase genes where we might find something that's immediately treatable and could make a big difference in cancer,’” Dr. Meyerson recalls. “Bill has a lot of scientific courage—he just dives right in and is not deterred by anything.”