Barbara M. Weinstein PhD

Dr. Brant M. Weinstein received his Ph. D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and carried out postdoctoral studies in the laboratory of Dr. Mark Fishman at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He joined the NICHD as a Primary Investigator in 1997. He became Deputy Director of the NICHD Program in Genomics of Differentiation in 2007 and then Director in 2010. Dr. Weinstein is a leading expert on zebrafish vascular development. His laboratory developed a widely used confocal micro-angiography method, compiled an atlas of the anatomy of the developing zebrafish vasculature, developed numerous vascular-specific transgenic fish lines, and pioneered methods for high resolution in vivo imaging of zebrafish blood vessels.

His laboratory has used all of these tools and methods to make a variety of important discoveries in the areas of vascular specification, differentiation, and patterning, including a novel pathway specifying arterial identity, a role for neuronal guidance factors in vascular patterning, a mechanism for vascular tube formation in vivo, and the identification of a lymphatic vascular system in the zebrafish.