President-Elect: 2025-2026
Flaherty is director of clinical cancer research and the Richard Saltonstall Endowed Chair in Oncology at Mass General Cancer Center, a founding member of Mass General Brigham. He is also a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and an associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
Flaherty’s career has focused on understanding the molecular and clinical consequences of inhibiting oncogenic pathways in melanoma while establishing therapeutic approaches and constructing rational combinatorial therapies for the treatment of this disease. He has pioneered the development of targeted therapies matched to the genetic characteristics of a patient’s tumor and led early clinical trials testing vemurafenib and other therapeutic agents for the treatment of melanoma. Through his work, Flaherty has translated discoveries about the BRAF V600E somatic mutation in cancer into effective therapies, including the FDA-approved combination targeted therapy regimens for melanoma.
Flaherty has been a member of the AACR since 2001 and was elected as a Fellow of the AACR Academy in 2023. He served with distinction on the AACR’s Board of Directors from 2019 to 2022. Flaherty provides important guidance as a current member of the Fellows of the AACR Academy Nominating Committee (2024-present), the AACR Clinical Trials Advisory Council (2023-present), the AACR Exploratory IND/Phase 0 Clinical Trials Task Force (2021-present), and the AACR Project GENIE External Advisory Board (2015-present). He is a former member of the AACR COVID-19 and Cancer Task Force (2020-2022), the AACR Publications Committee (2014-2017), and the AACR NextGen Grants for Transformative Cancer Research Review Committee (2015).
Flaherty has played a critical role in shaping the AACR Annual Meetings by serving as chair (2023-2024), vice chair (2020-2021), and cochair (2012-2013, 2010) of the Annual Meeting Program Committee. He was a member of the Annual Meeting Clinical Trials Committee (2018-2020, 2016-2018, 2012-2013) and chair of the Clinical Trials and Clinical Pharmacology Section of the Annual Meeting Program Committee (2013). He has also helped to guide other AACR scientific conferences and workshops by serving as a member of the AACR Virtual Conference: COVID-19 and Cancer Program Committee (2020), a faculty member of the AACR Clinical Trial Design Part 1: Clinical Trial Design for Targeted Therapies Workshop (2018), and chair of the AACR Special Conference on Translational Cancer Medicine (2010).
In addition, Flaherty previously served as the editor-in-chief (2016-2025) and senior editor (2010-2016) of the AACR journal Clinical Cancer Research. He has also served as scientific editor for the AACR journal Cancer Discovery (2010-2017).
Flaherty has been honored with numerous awards throughout his career, most notably the OncLive Giants of Cancer Care Award for Melanoma (2020), the Society for Melanoma Research Lifetime Achievement Award (2019), the National Cancer Institute Michaele C. Christian Oncology Development Lectureship and Award (2015), the Mass General Cancer Center Harrison Clinical Research Award (2013), and the Peter Fink Memorial Lectureship (2013).
Flaherty earned his undergraduate degree in neurobiology at Yale University and his medical degree at Johns Hopkins University.
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