Phillip Newmark PhD

Phillip Newmark is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Burnell Roberts Chair in Regenerative Biology at the Morgridge Institute for Research, and a Professor of Integrative Biology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He received his B.A. in biology from Boston University and his Ph.D. in molecular, cellular, and developmental biology from the University of Colorado at Boulder. As a postdoctoral fellow, he sought to introduce molecular techniques to study planarian regeneration, a classic problem of developmental biology. Because there were no laboratories in the U.S. with expertise in planarian biology, he began his post-doctoral work as a Damon Runyon Fellow with Jaume Baguñà at the University of Barcelona. After learning the requisite planarian biology to initiate an independent line of research, he returned to the U.S., bringing his expertise on planarians and a thermos full of Schmidtea Mediterranea to Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado’s laboratory at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Embryology, which had previously focused on amphibian regeneration. Together, their work helped revitalize research on these fascinating organisms and permitted detailed analyses of the mechanisms underlying their amazing regenerative abilities. This work continued in his independent laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 2001-to 2016, after which he moved to Madison. His current research seeks to understand how the planarian’s somatic stem cells produce the germ cells and various differentiated cells in the animal. His group has also been applying their knowledge about planarians to understand the biology of the planarian’s parasitic cousins, the schistosomes, and tapeworms.