Dr. Staudt received his B.A. from Harvard College in 1976, graduating Cum Laude in Biochemistry.  He was awarded a Medical Scientist Training Program fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and received his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees in 1982.  His Ph.D. thesis revealed somatic hypermutation as the mechanism of rapid antibody diversification during normal immune responses.  Following Internal Medicine training, he joined Nobel Laureate David Baltimore's laboratory at the Whitehead Institute as a Jane Coffin Childs Fellow.  There he cloned and characterized the first tissue-specific transcription factor, Oct-2.  In 1988, he established his laboratory at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), which now focuses on the molecular basis for human lymphoid malignancies and the development of targeted therapies for these cancers.  Dr. Staudt is currently Co-Chief of the Lymphoid Malignancies Branch (previously the Metabolism Branch) in the NCI.  In addition, he is the Director of the NCI Center for Cancer Genomics, which oversees several large-scale managed programs studying the genomic aberrations in cancer.  

In 2011, Dr. Staudt was given the honorary title of NIH Distinguished Investigator.  He has received numerous awards for his research, including the 2009 Dameshek Prize from the American Society of Hematology for outstanding contribution in hematology and election to the National Academy of Sciences in 2013.