Kevin J. Tracey, is Director of The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, and Professor and President of the Elmezzi Graduate School of Molecular Medicine, in Manhasset, NY. A neurosurgeon by training, he is a leader within the field of inflammation research. His contributions to science include discovery of: the direct inflammatory activity of tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF), and the therapeutic potential of monoclonal anti-TNF antibodies; the cytokine activity of HMGB1, and the therapeutic potential to target this mediator at the intersection of sterile and infectious inflammation; and the neurological basis for controlling immunity by reflex mechanisms. His publications include 240 papers, and The Institute for Scientific Information named him “Highly Cited Researcher in Immunology,” placing him in the top 0.5% of all publishing scientists.

Professor Tracey received his B.S. (Chemistry) from Boston College in 1979 and his M.D. from Boston University in 1983. From 1983 to 1992 he trained as a neurosurgeon at the New York Hospital/Cornell University Medical Center, and was a guest investigator at the Rockefeller University. In 1992, Tracey moved his lab to the Feinstein Institute in Manhasset, NY. He also opened a neurosurgery practice there, continuing until 2001, when he was appointed the founding program director for the General Clinical Research Center, which received designation from the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He was appointed Director of the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in 2005.

Professor Tracey’s honors include an Honorary degree from the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden in 2009; the DeWitt Stetten lectureship from The National Institutes of Health in 2007; and the Annual Clinical Science Lectureship in 2002 from the Karolinska Institute. He has received lectureships from Harvard, Yale, The Rockefeller University, The Scripps Institute, the University of Texas Southwestern, and elsewhere. He is an elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation (2001), and the American Association of Physicians (2009).

He co-chaired the first international scientific congress addressing the “The Inflammatory Reflex,” a Nobel Conference in 2004 of the Karolinska Institute; and co-chaired the “First HMGB1 Cytokine World Congress” in 2003 in Saltsjobaden, Sweden. Dr. Tracey is Editor in Chief of Molecular Medicine, and Advisory Editor of The Journal of Experimental Medicine. His critically acclaimed book, Fatal Sequence: The Killer Within, published by the Dana Press in 2005, recounts the hospital course of a young patient with sepsis who changed his life, and the series of remarkable events that shaped his research.