Bradley Cairns, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Oncological Sciences at the University of Utah School of Medicine and an investigator at Huntsman Cancer Institute.

Cairns has a particular interest in the cellular and molecular basis of childhood cancers. Many types of leukemia result from errors in the way genes are "unpackaged" or "read" during the process of cell \ replication. Certain mutations in the cellular machinery that unpackages genes can lead to the formation of aggressive early childhood cancers. Cairns’s laboratory strives to understand these diseases at the molecular level and to design therapies for their treatment based on new understanding. Discoveries from his laboratory have appeared in many scientific journals, including Nature, Cell, Molecular Cell, Genes and Development, Molecular and Cellular Biology, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

Cairns received his PhD in cell biology from Stanford University in 1991 and received a postdoctoral fellowship from the American Cancer Society to continue his studies. In 1996, he initiated postdoctoral studies in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School as a fellow of the Leukemia Society of America. He joined Huntsman Cancer Institute and the Department of Oncological Sciences in 1998. Cairns was appointed a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator in May 2000.