- Global Education
- Speaker Program
Belmont Hill recently welcomed a most esteemed speaker, when Nobel Prize-winning scientist Shinya Yamanaka MD, PhD spoke remotely in Hamilton Chapel. This special morning was kicked off by one of Belmont Hill’s most distinguished alumni, Jonathan Kraft ’82 P '15, who introduced the moderator, George Q. Daley MD, PhD P’17, ’19, and speaker Dr. Yamanaka.
Dr. Daley is Dean of Harvard Medical School and the Caroline Shields Walker Professor of Medicine. He is also a Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School. Previously he was the Robert A. Stranahan Professor of Pediatrics and Director of the Stem Cell Transplantation Program at Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. Shinya Yamanaka, MD, PhD, is a senior investigator and the L.K. Whittier Foundation Investigator in Stem Cell Biology at Gladstone Institutes. He is also a professor of anatomy at UC San Francisco, as well as a director and professor of the Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA) at Kyoto University in Japan. In 2012, Dr. Yamanaka was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery that adult somatic cells can be reprogrammed into pluripotent cells. In addition, he has received many awards and honors, including the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, the Wolf Prize in Medicine, the Millennium Technology Award, the Shaw Prize, the Kyoto Prize for Advanced Technology, the Gairdner International Award, the Robert Koch Award, and the March of Dimes Prize.
The Kageyama-Hunt Lecture Series, established in 2012 by Belmont Hill parents Bill and Yuko Hunt, brings speakers to campus who model global citizenship and can inspire generations of Belmont Hill boys to embrace the challenges and opportunities of an interconnected world.
You can watch the discussion in its entirety in the video posted below.