Knut Niss PhD

Dr. Niss completed his doctoral work at the Max-Delbrueck Center in Berlin, Germany working on developmental pathways involved in leukemic cell transformation. He holds a PhD in molecular biology and a master's degree in biology. Following his doctorate work Dr. Niss performed his postdoctoral studies at Children's Hospital and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Here, he analyzed genes involved in hematopoietic stem cell maintenance and differentiation. Following his postdoctoral work, Dr. Niss joined Pfizer's Immunology group first in Connecticut and later in St. Louis to serve as a team leader for hematopoiesis. In this role, he oversaw the implementation of various small molecule and biologics programs into Pfizer's preclinical pipeline. Following this, Dr. Niss was appointed as the research team leader for adult stem cells in Pfizer's Regenerative Medicine unit in Cambridge, MA. In this role, his responsibilities included identifying and evaluating new opportunities for cell therapies as well as overseeing the research efforts within Pfizer's clinical program. Recently, Dr. Niss was a Senior R&D program manager for EMD Millipore's Stem Cell Initiative. There, he led the efforts on large scale stem cell expansion and downstream processing. Under his supervision, his group was the first to show stem scale expansion processes at the 50L scale. In 2013, Dr. Niss moved his career to Novartis Pharmaceuticals in Morris Plains, NJ where he serves as the senior technical project leader for Novartis' cell therapy programs.