Dennis E. Discher
University of Pennsylvania, USA
2024

Dennis E. Discher, Ph.D., is the Robert D. Bent Professor and the Director of the NCI-designated Physical Sciences Oncology Center/Project @ Penn, the University of Pennsyvania, Philadelphia, PA.

Discher began at Penn in 1996 with a PhD from UC Berkeley & UC San Francisco in membrane mechanobiology and biochemistry and after an NSF Fellowship in British Columbia in computational biophysics. His lab (www.seas.upenn.edu/~discher) discovered matrix elasticity effects on stem cell differentiation (Cell 2006) and nucleus mechanosensing (Science 2013). Recent efforts focus on the cell/tissue level physics of heritable genetic change, which is important to tumor evolution and immunity. His lab developed block copolymer nano-particles for delivery (Science 2002) which prompted deeper study of ‘foreign versus self’ recognition by immune cells (Science 2013) and more recent engineered macrophages against cancer (Nature BME 2023). He is an elected member of the US National Academy of Medicine, the US National Academy of Engineering, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and serves on Editorial Boards of Science, Molecular Biology of the Cell, and PNAS Nexus, among other journals.