Tony Pawson is currently a Distinguished Scientist at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute of Mt. Sinai Hospital in Toronto, and a Professor at the University of Toronto. He was an undergraduate at Cambridge University, obtained his Ph.D. at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London, and undertook postdoctoral work at the University of California at Berkeley, where he identified a variety of retroviral oncoproteins. He moved to the University of British Columbia, Vancouver as an Assistant Professor in 1981, and to Toronto in 1985. Over the last 20 years has explored the mechanisms through which regulated protein-protein interactions control intracellular signaling pathways, building on his identification of the SH2 domain as the prototypic interaction module.

Tony has received a number of awards, including the Gairdner Foundation International Award, the AACR/Pezcoller International Award for Cancer Research, the Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences), the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize, the Royal Medal of the Royal Society of London, and the Wolf Prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Societies of London and Canada, a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences (US), and an Associate Member of EMBO. He was recently appointed as a Companion of Honour by Queen Elizabeth II.