Invited Speakers

Dennis E. Discher

Robert D. Bent chaired Professor,

Director of the National Cancer Institute’s Physical Sciences Oncology Center, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104

USA

Group Website:

http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~discher/

Dennis E. Discher is the Robert D. Bent chaired Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and an elected member of both the US National Academy of Engineering and the US National Academy of Medicine. He has multiple appointments in the School of Engineering Applied Science and Graduate Groups in Pharmacology and Cell & Molecular Biology in Penn’s School of Medicine as well as in Physics. He received a Ph.D. jointly from the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco in 1993, and has been at Penn since 1996. His lab’s studies emphasize physicochemical approaches and insights – often involving polymers and statistical mechanics – as well as cell and molecular biology. He has coauthored more than 200 publications with over 32,000 citations that range in topic from polymer elasticity effects on stem cells and macrophage recognition of ‘Self’ polypeptides (versus ‘Foreign’) to self-assembling block copolymers (Polymersomes and Filomicelles) in application to disease, with papers appearing in Science, Cell, PNAS, and various Nature journals. Additional honors and service include a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from the US-National Science Foundation, the Best Paper Award 2004 Journal of Controlled Release, the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Award from the Humboldt Foundation of Germany, and membership on the Editorial Board for Science.