Dr. Flaherty is Director of Clinical Research at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. As described in the more than 300 peer reviewed primary research reports he has authored or co-authored, Dr. Flaherty and colleagues made several seminal observations that have defined the treatment of melanoma when they established the efficacy of BRAF, MEK and combined BRAF/MEK inhibition in patients with metastatic melanoma in a series of New England Journal of Medicine articles for which Dr. Flaherty was the first or senior author. He was the principal investigator of the NCI MATCH trial, the first NCI-sponsored trial assigning patients to targeted therapy independent of tumor type on the basis of DNA sequencing detection of oncogenes. Dr. Flaherty joined the NCI Board of Scientific Advisors in 2018 (chair 2021-23), AACR Board of Directors in 2019, and was elected President of AACR in 2025. Dr. Flaherty co-founded Loxo Oncology in 2013 and Scorpion Therapeutics in 2020, serving on the board of directors through the acquisitions of both by Eli Lilly in 2019 and 2025. He co-founded X4 Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: XFOR), privately held Strata Oncology (2015), Apricity Oncology (2017), Gyges Oncology (2020), Khora Therapeutics (2024), and Monimoi Therapeutics (2025). He has served on the boards of directors for Clovis Oncology, Kinnate BioPharma, and Checkmate Pharmaceuticals (until its acquisition by Regeneron in 2022), along with Loxo Oncology, Strata Oncology and Scorpion Therapeutics.