Kolodner earned an undergraduate degree and a Ph.D. at
University of California, Irvine. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at
Harvard Medical School, where he studied
DNA replication. After joining the faculty at
Harvard Medical School and
Dana–Farber Cancer Institute in 1978 and establishing his own laboratory, he focused his research on
DNA recombination. Kolodner has made fundamental contributions to the understanding of the mechanisms of genetic recombination, DNA mismatch repair and the pathways that prevent genome instability. While studying
DNA repair in bacteria and yeast, Kolodner identified two DNA mismatch repair genes, MSH2 and MLH1, that lead to 95 percent of hereditary colon cancer cases. In both cases, Kolodner reported his findings simultaneously with
Bert Vogelstein at
Johns Hopkins University. Kolodner also discovered that epigenetic silencing of MLH1 is the cause of much more common sporadic mismatch repair defective cancers. Kolodner was the Director of Ludwig Cancer Research San Diego Branch, and he is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the
UC San Diego School of Medicine. He has also been elected a fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the
National Academy of Medicine. He is a past recipient of the
Charles S. Mott Prize for Outstanding Research in Cancer Causation or Prevention, awarded by the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation and the Kirk A. Landon-AACR Prize in Basic Cancer Research. Kolodner was one of six UCSD faculty members to sue the institution over a planned reduction in funding to the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research. ==References==