Gerd A. Blobel MD, PhD

Gerd A. Blobel MD, Ph.D., holds the Frank E. Weise III Endowed Chair of Pediatrics at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the Perelman School of Medicine. Dr. Blobel earned his MD degree from the University of Heidelberg, Germany, and a Ph.D. degree from Rockefeller University in New York. His lab focuses on the genetic and epigenetic control of hematopoiesis and its disorders. Specifically, he studies how tissue-specific transcription factors govern the specification and maintenance of hematopoietic cell lineages.

He also examines how transcription programs are epigenetically transmitted through mitosis to maintain lineage identity, and how genetic regulatory elements are organized spatially within the nucleus. He has given numerous lectures at international conferences on hematopoiesis, transcription, and epigenetics. Dr. Blobel has been continually funded by the NIH since arriving at Penn and holds a MERIT award. He was elected to the ASCI (2004) and AAP (2008). Dr. Blobel is the co-director of the Epigenetics Program at the University of Pennsylvania.