Kidney Development and Regeneration

Paul M. Wassarman, the Series Editor of CTDB since 2007, is Professor in the Dept. Developmental and Regenerative Biology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. He received a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Brandeis University where he carried out thesis research in the Graduate Dept. Biochemistry with Professor Nathan O. Kaplan. In 1967 Wassarman joined the Division of Structural Studies at the MRC, Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England as a Helen Hay Whitney Foundation Fellow with Sir John C. Kendrew. In 1972 he joined the faculty of the Dept. Biological Chemistry at Harvard Medical School and in 1986 moved to the Roche Institute of Molecular Biology where he was Chair of the Dept. Cell and Developmental Biology and Adjunct Professor in the Dept. Cell Biology, New York University School of Medicine. In 1996 he moved to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai where he was the Lillian and Henry M. Stratton Professorial Chair of the Dept. Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology. Wassarman has published more than 200 research papers and reviews, dealing primarily with mammalian oogenesis, fertilization, and early embryogenesis. Jamie Davies studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge, then embarked on a career in developmental and synthetic biology, establishing a laboratory at the University of Edinburgh which has been active in the kidney development field for 30 years. His lab played a critical role in identifying earliest-discovered signaling pathways in renal development, in understanding the relationship between normal and neoplastic development, and in aspects of patterning. The lab produced the first renal organoids, using ex-fetu cells, and has since gone on to develop ways of making these organoids more realistic. In parallel, Davies' lab has been a pioneer of synthetic morphogenesis, engineering cells to self-organize into patterning, morphogenetic systems. He has written/ edited over 10 books, 3 for public engagement and the others technical volumes for researchers. He has won several prizes for his work, and has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology. He is currently Professor of Experimental Anatomy at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.