Dr. Pestell has authored over 170 original publications and book chapters and over 130 published abstracts. His papers have been published in outstanding journals including Cell, Science, Nature Medicine, Molecular Cell and EMBO J. His total scientific impact is over 800. His work is highly cited and he was ranked first in the world for increase in total scientific impact in Biology and first in the world for Biochemistry (ISI) in March 2002. Dr Pestell is funded as the Principal Investigator of 4 R01 grants and PI of the Lombardi Cancer Center CCSG grant.

Dr. Pestell has made major contributions to the area of cell-cycle control. These include the discovery that cyclins are direct transcriptional targets of oncogenic and tumor suppressor signals and that cyclin expression is rate-limiting for oncogene-induced tumor growth in vivo His laboratory established this as a general mechanisms of oncogenic signaling and showed that the cyclins physically interact with nuclear receptors and tumor suppressors providing novel targets for cancer therapies. Most recently he has shown that nuclear receptors are acetylated, and that this event is rate-limiting in hormone signaling and growth control. He demonstrated that this was a general mechanism conserved among nuclear receptors that affect diverse biological processes. His laboratory pioneered the application of tissue-specific inducible transgenics and the development of gene-targeted and transgenic mice to model the role of cell-cycle proteins in human cancer.