Affiliation: University of Washington, Seattle, WA, Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, Department of Bioengineering, Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine

Dr. David Mack is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Rehabilitation Medicine and Bioengineering, as well as an Investigator in the Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine at the University of Washington. He has a longstanding interest in how stem cells make cell fate decisions during embryonic development by coordinating their intrinsic genetic program with cues from their surrounding microenvironment. The goal of the Mack laboratory is to apply their understanding of this basic question to the development of stem cell and gene therapy treatments for neuromuscular diseases. David’s expertise is rooted at the intersection of genetics, developmental biology, cancer biology and biomaterials, which resulted directly from different phases of his professional training. The foundation is a PhD in molecular genetics from the Indiana University School of Medicine, where he studied transcriptional regulation of T-cell development and how this process goes awry to cause leukemia. As a postdoctoral fellow at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, he studied how tissue-specific stem cells interact with their microenvironment and how this impacts cell fate choices during mammary gland development, and the molecular defects that cause breast cancer. David then switched from cancer research to the relatively new field of regenerative medicine by accepting a senior postdoc position at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine. Under the leadership of Dr. Anthony Atala, David’s work focused on how to control embryonic and fetal stem cell differentiation by using natural and artificial scaffolds in concert with direct manipulation of the cells’ genetic program. All of these efforts have the overriding purpose of developing therapies to enhance tissue repair and regeneration following injury or disease.