Alan Bernstein, OC FRSC is President and Chief Executive Officer of the Canadian Institute for Advanced.
Education
Born in Toronto, Bernstein attended Oakwood Collegiate Institute, and then received his Doctor of Philosophy at the. Following postdoctoral research in London at the Imperial Cancer Fund where he first began working on retroviruses, he returned to Canada in 1974 to join the faculty of the Ontario Cancer Institute. In 1985, he joined the new Samuel Lunenfeld Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital as Head of the Division of Molecular and Developmental Biology, and then served as its Director of from 1994 – 2000.
Career
Prior to his position at CIFAR, Bernstein was the inaugural executive director of the Global Human Immunodeficiency Virus Vaccine Enterprise, an alliance of independent organizations around the world dedicated to accelerating the development of a preventive Human Immunodeficiency Virus vaccine. Bernstein resigned in June 2011. Prior to leading the Enterprise, Bernstein served as the founding president of the Canadian Institutes of Health (CIHR) from 2000 – 2007.
During that time, he led a transformation in how health research is organized and funded in Canada and increased Canada’s health research budget by 2.5 fold.
Bernstein’s research interests have centered on hematopoiesis, cancer and embryonic development. He has authored more than 200 peer-reviewed scientific publications.