Jonathan Simons

Simons was raised in Ithaca, New York. He is the husband, son, and grandson of cancer survivors. Simons’ father, David M. Simons, a professor at Cornell University, was among the first thousand patients cured of relapsed Hodgkin’s Lymphoma as a part of participation in National Cancer Institute clinical trials. Simons is the grandson of M.L. Wilson, who served as the Under Secretary of Agriculture under President Franklin Roosevelt. A 1976 graduate of Ithaca High School, Simons graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University with an A.B. in biochemistry in 1980.[8] Before entering medical school, Simons had a concentration in the Shakespeare Canon as a Rotary International Postgraduate Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England; subsequently he had a Nuffield Foundation research scholarship in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge in 1981.[8]

Simons received an MD degree from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1985. He completed his residency in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and a clinical fellowship in medical oncology at the Johns Hopkins Oncology Center.[8]

Simons is board-certified in internal medicine and medical oncology. At Johns Hopkins, Simons completed a post-doctoral fellowship under Bert Vogelstein in human cancer molecular genetics prior to being appointed to the Hopkins medical school faculty in oncology and urology in 1991.[8] On the Hopkins faculty, Simons chaired the Hopkins medical school Curriculum Committee for Oncology from 1990 to 2000. Simons' first independent laboratory research grant was from the Prostate Cancer Foundation (formerly known as CaPCure) in the Foundation’s first year of existence in 1993.

Simons was recruited by Georgia Governor Roy Barnes, and the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation of Atlanta to be the Founding Director of the Winship Cancer Institute at Emory University and Chair of Hematology and Oncology at the Emory Clinic.[9][8] Simons led the creation of the Georgia State Cancer Plan, Georgia’s tobacco settlement investment in cancer research and new faculty recruitment programs within the Georgia Cancer Coalition.[10] Simons co-directed with Shuming Nie the National Cancer Institute Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence at Emory and Georgia Institute of Technology.[11] From 2000 to 2006, Simons was a Distinguished Service Professor of Hematology and Oncology at the Emory University School of Medicine, and Professor of Materials Sciences Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

With Michael Milken, chairman of the board of FasterCures, Simons created the strategic plan and served as the interim chief science officer for the launch of the Melanoma Research Alliance. The Melanoma Research Alliance was founded by Debra and Leon Black in 2007.[12]

In 2011, Simons was inducted into the Johns Hopkins University Society of Scholars. The society inducts former postdoctoral fellows, postdoctoral degree recipients, house staff and junior or visiting faculty who have served at least a year at Johns Hopkins and thereafter gained marked distinction elsewhere in their fields.[13]

Simons received the Johns Hopkins University Distinguished Alumni Award in 2020 from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.[14]