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Ana M. Soto, MD (she/her/hers)

Professor
Tufts University School of Medicine
BOSTON, MA, United States

Dr. Ana M. Soto is a theoretical and experimental biologist and a Professor at Tufts University School of Medicine. She is also a Fellow at Centre Cavaillès, École Normale Supérieure, where she held the prestigious Blaise Pascal Chair in Biology (2013–2015). Taking the regulatory role of steroid hormones as a unifying thread and emphasizing the reciprocal interactions between stroma and parenchyma, her research addresses the control of cell proliferation, the developmental origins of cancer, and endocrine disruption.
With Professor Carlos Sonnenschein, she co-authored The Society of Cells (Bios-Springer, 1999), proposing that the default state of cells is proliferation and advancing the Tissue Organization Field Theory of Carcinogenesis, which conceptualizes cancer as deregulation of stroma-parenchyma interactions (“development gone awry”). Additionally, she pioneered the field of endocrine disruption by demonstrating that plastics can release estrogenic compounds, and by co-authoring the field's founding paper (Colborn, vom Saal, and Soto, 1973).
As the Blaise Pascal Chair, Dr. Soto led a multidisciplinary effort toward a theory of organisms (Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, 122:1-88, 2016). During her fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study of Nantes (2021–2022), she examined the “proletarianization” of biological thought, which began with the idea that biology could be reduced to physics and was further exacerbated by the misuse of concepts derived from mathematical information theories.
Dr. Soto has authored over 200 publications, both experimental and theoretical. Her honors include the Gabbay Biotechnology & Medicine Award (2012), election to the Collegium Ramazzini (2011), and the Grand Vermeil Medal of the City of Paris (2019). She has advised the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the U.S. EPA, testified before the U.S. Congress and the French Assemblée Nationale, and received funding from major U.S., European, and international agencies.

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