Joseph Schlessinger has been the William H. Prusoff Professor and Chairman of the Department of Pharmacology at Yale University School of Medicine since 2001. He was the Director of the Skirball Institute for Biomolecular Medicine at New York University (NYU) Medical Center from 1998-2001 and the Milton and Helen Kimmelman Professor and Chairman of the Department of Pharmacology at NYU Medical School from 1990-2001. He was a member of the Weizmann Institute from 1978-1991 and the Ruth and Leonard Simon Professor of Cancer Research in the Department of Immunology from 1985-1991. Joseph Schlessinger was a Research Director for Rorer Biotechnology from 1985-1990. He founded Sugen, Inc. in 1991, Plexxikon in 2001, and Kolltan in 2008.

Joseph Schlessinger received a B.Sc. degree in Chemistry and Physics in 1968 (magna cum laude), and a M.Sc. degree in chemistry (magna cum laude) in 1970 from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He obtained a Ph.D. degree in biophysics from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1974. From 1974-1976, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Departments of Chemistry and Applied Physics at Cornell University, and from 1977-1978, he was a visiting fellow in the immunology branch of the National Cancer Institute of NIH.

Schlessinger received the Michael Landeau Prize (1973), Sara Leady Prize (1980), Hestrin Prize (1983), Levinson Prize (1984), Ciba-Drew Award (1995), Antoine Lacassagne Prize (1995), The Distinguished Service Award of Miami Biotechnology (1999), Honorary Membership of the Japanese Biochemical Society (1999), Taylor Prize (2000),  Honorary Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Haifa (2002) the Medal of Danica Hrvatska Order, Republic of Croatia (2009), and the Penzcoller Foundation-AACR International Award for Cancer (2010).

He is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) (1982), a member of the National Academy of Sciences (2000), a fellow of Neuroscience Research Program (2000), a member of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2001), a member of the European Academy of Sciences (2004), a member of the Academy of Sciences (2005), a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences (2006), and a foreign member of the Croation Academy of Sciences (2008). He is serving on the editorial boards of numerous journals including Cell and Molecular Cell.

He has delivered many named lectures including The Fourth Kroc Lecture, Harvard Medical School (1988); E.J. Cohn Lecture, Harvard Medical School (1993); E. Fisher Lecture, University of Geneva (1993); Lamport Lecture, University of Seattle (1993); Harvey Lecture, Rockefeller University (1994); Deans Lecture, Mount Sinai Medical School (1994); Feigen Lecture, Stanford University (1994); Randall Lecture, University of Pennsylvania (1994); Sigma Tau Lecture, Rome, Italy (1995); Lindner Lecture, Weizmann Institute (1996); Burroughs Wellcome Lectures, University of Indiana (1997); Juan March Lecture, Madrid, Spain (1998); Bayer Lecture, Berkeley (1999); Sixth Kroc Lecture, University of Massachusetts (1999); NIH Director Lecture (2000); K.F. Naidorf Lecture, Columbia University (2000); Distinguished Speaker, University of Texas, San Antonio (2000); Severo Ochoa Lecture, Madrid Spain (2000); First Alton Meister Lecture, Cornell University (2001); Fritz Lipmann Lecture, German Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (2001); Karl Beyer Lectures, University of Wisconsin, Madison (2003); Asher Rothstein Lecture, The Hospital for Sick Children Research Institute, Toronto Canada (2003); the Distinguished Lecture on Molecular Targets for Cancer Prevention, AACR, Baltimore, Maryland (2005); The Thirty-third Annual Calbiochem-UCSD Lectureship Series (2006); The Forty-first Annual Mager Lecture, Hebrew University (2006), NIH-WALS Lecture, Bethesda, Maryland (2008); Helen Coley-Nauts Lecture, Moscow State University (2008); the Twenty-fourth Medical Scientist Lecture Series, at UC Irvine (2008); Ef Racker Lecture in Biology and Medicine, Cornell University (2009); The Robert Sternlicht Memorial Lectureship, Case Western Reserve University; the Stanley Korsmeyer Lecutre, Padova, Italy (2010); and the Raffaele Tecce Lecture, Rome, Italy (2010).