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Nancy A. Speck: Chair of the Department of Cell & Developmental Biology

caption: Nancy Speck

Nancy A. Speck has been named the chair of the department of cell & developmental biology. One of Penn Medicine’s pre-eminent thought leaders, she also serves as co-leader of the Hematologic Malignancies Program at the Abramson Cancer Center, an investigator at the Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute and associate director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine. Her leadership positions beyond the Penn campus include study sections on which she has served and chaired at the National Institutes of Health, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and the American Society of Hematology.

For 30 years, Dr. Speck has made innovative contributions to the field of blood-cell development, expanding knowledge with a translational impact for understanding leukemia, including identification of the proteins Runx1 and CBFβ.

“Dr. Speck, an internationally renowned scientific leader, is a thoughtful, inclusive, collaborative investigator, with a discerning eye for elegant work,” said J. Larry Jameson, dean of the Perelman School of Medicine and executive vice president for the Health System. “She is also a devoted teacher much respected for her mentoring and dedication to developing the careers of young investigators.”

Dr. Speck earned her PhD in biochemistry from Northwestern University in 1983. She completed postdoctoral research fellowships in retroviral pathogenesis and eukaryotic gene regulation at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and MIT. Subsequently, she started her own laboratory at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine, where she was serving as the James J. Carroll Chair of Oncology, before her recruitment to Penn in 2008.

Her predecessor, Jonathan A. Epstein, now the executive vice dean and chief scientific officer of Penn Medicine, said, “Dr. Speck is a bold, creative researcher who excels as a scientist, leader, role model and mentor. She is the ideal person to direct the talented faculty of cell & developmental biology.”

Dr. Speck’s work has been published in more than 100 peer-reviewed academic journals. She also serves as a reviewer for leading journals such as Blood, Nature, Nature Genetics, Cell, Stem Cell, Cancer Cell, Science and PNAS. Among numerous awards and accolades, she has received the Leukemia Society of America Scholar Award, the Fogarty International Center Senior Fellow Award and the 2015 Henry M. Stratton Medal for Basic Science from the American Society of Hematology.

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