Carl F. Nathan

Carl F. Nathan is the chair of the department of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medicine and a former dean of the Weill Graduate School of Medical Sciences at Cornell University. Some of his most notable work has been in the characterization of IFNγ, TGF-β, and TNFα in immunology. The Nathan lab studies the immune response to M. tuberculosis.

Nathan was born to Paul and Dorothy Nathan. His brother is Andrew J. Nathan, a Columbia University political scientist, and his sister Janet Nathan. ^[1] He graduated from Harvard College in 1967. His senior honors thesis, "Plague Prevention and Politics in Manchuria, 1910-1931" was published in by the East Asian Research Center, Harvard University. He graduated Harvard Medical School in 1972. After an internal medicine residency, he did a fellowship in oncology. He was a professor at the Rockefeller University from 1977–1986, before moving to Cornell.^[2] He served as the chair of the department of microbiology and immunology from 1998 to 2025.^[3][4] His lab is in the Belfer Research Building.^[5]

Nathan was involved in the discovery of the roles of IFNγ, TGF-β, and TNFα in macrophages.^[2][6]

Nathan was elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation in 1983 and the National Academy of Medicine in 1998.^[7] He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2011.^[8] He received the Robert Koch Prize in 2009 and the Anthony Cerami Award in Translational Medicine in 2013.^[9]

He married Amy Singewald, an educator, actress, and writer in 1967 ^[10]

• Nathan, Carl F. Plague Prevention and Politics in Manchuria, 1910-1931. Cambridge: East Asian Research Center, Harvard University; distributed by Harvard University Press, 1967.