Steven D. Leach, MD, serves as Interim Dean of the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, and a Professor of Molecular and Systems Biology, Surgery, and of Medicine.
Prior to his appointment as interim Dean in 2025, Dr. Leach served as Associate Dean for Cancer Programs and Director of the Dartmouth Cancer Center. Before joining Dartmouth in 2017, he directed Memorial Sloan Kettering's Rubenstein Center for Pancreatic Cancer Research, and also served as Professor of Surgery, Oncology and Cell Biology at Johns Hopkins.
Dr. Leach received his bachelor’s degree with high honors in Biology from Princeton University. In 1986, he received his medical degree from Emory School of Medicine, where he was a Robert Woodruff Fellow and member of Alpha Omega Alpha, followed by additional training at Yale and M.D. Anderson in surgical oncology and cell biology.
Dr. Leach’s laboratory has a long track record of research productivity in the field of pancreatic cancer biology and is known for establishing important links between pancreatic development and pancreatic cancer using both mouse and zebrafish model systems. More recently, his group has completed large-scale genomic and transcriptomic mapping of the pancreatic cancer immune neoepitope landscape and also made important new discoveries regarding altered mRNA splicing as a new therapeutic target in this disease. Together with additional studies of pancreatic development and pancreatic epithelial plasticity, these findings have widened our view of both early and late events in human pancreatic cancer.
In addition to these scientific achievements, Dr. Leach also has a long track record of successful mentorship of graduate students, post-doctoral research fellows and junior faculty. To date, he has personally mentored a total of 33 students and postdoctoral research fellows, many of whom have gone on to achieve their own independent faculty positions and independent NIH funding. Dr. Leach has been the principal investigator for multiple NIH R01, P01, P30, U01, S10 and T32 grants, and has received multiple awards honoring this work. In 2015 he was awarded Columbia University’s Ruth Leff Seigel Award for national excellence in pancreatic cancer research, and in 2019 he was inducted as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Leach has also previously served as Chair of the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network’s Scientific and Medical Advisory Board, as Co-Editor in Chief for Current Opinion in Genetics and Development, and as a member of the Board of Trustees at Princeton University. At Dartmouth, he has also been a champion for inclusive excellence, having received the Geisel School of Medicine’s 2025 Martin Luther King, Jr. Legacy Award. In 2023, he was elected to the membership in the prestigious National Academy of Medicine.