The Department of Medicine is pleased to announce the promotion of Christopher J. Clarke, Ph.D., Division of Hematology and Oncology, to Associate Professor of Medicine with Tenure in the Renaissance School of Medicine at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Dr. Clarke is a co-leader of the Lipid Signaling and Metabolism research program in Stony Brook Cancer Center. Originally from North Yorkshire, England, Dr. Clarke earned his Bachelor of Science in Physiology with Biochemistry from the University of Salford and his PhD from the University of Manchester. Dr. Clarke moved to Charleston, South Carolina, for postdoctoral training in the research group of Dr Yusuf Hannun. After moving to Stony Brook in 2012 as a senior research scientist in the Hannun Group, Dr. Clarke obtained a number of internal grants including Department of Medicine pilot projects and was able to successfully channel these funds into extramural R01 funds from the National Cancer Institute. He is also a member of the Cancer Center team that recently bought in $11 million of funding from a program project grant. 
Dr. Clarke’s research is focused on sphingolipids – a class of bioactive signaling molecules – and the role that they play in cancer development and progression. By trying to understand the role that sphingolipids play in driving metastasis, their involvement in chemotherapy-induced cardiotoxicity, and in shaping the response to chemotherapies and immunotherapies, Dr. Clarke hopes to identify novel targets for therapeutic intervention and define new biomarkers of disease.
Outside of Stony Brook, Dr. Clarke is widely known in the sphingolipid field having helped to organize international conferences and is a founding member of the Sphingolipid Biology webinar series – initiated during the COVID pandemic as a way for the research community to keep in touch and continue to present their latest research during lockdown.
Please join us in congratulating Dr. Clarke on this well-earned promotion, and in recognizing his research excellence within the Stony Brook Cancer Center and the Department of Medicine and the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University.
Yusuf A. Hannun, MD
Joel Strum Kenny Professor in Cancer Research
SUNY Distinguished Professor
Director, The Kavita and Lalit Bahl Center for Metabolomics and Imaging
Director Emeritus, Stony Brook Cancer Center
Stony Brook University
Vincent W. Yang, M.D., Ph.D., FACP, AGAF, FAAAS
SUNY Distinguished Professor
Simons Chair of Medicine
Professor of Medicine, Biomedical Informatics, and Physiology & Biophysics
Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University