Biography: Matthew Scott

Professor Scott was an undergraduate and graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1971 to 1980, with Professor Mary Lou Pardue as his doctoral advisor. He investigated the control of protein synthesis during cell stress. He was a Helen Hay Whitney postdoctoral fellow at Indiana University from 1980-83 with Professors Thomas Kaufman and Barry Polisky, where he isolated and studied genes that organize head to tail patterning in animal embryos. He set up his own laboratory at the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1983, where he was subsequently appointed to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute as an Investigator. There he and his colleagues investigated fundamental molecular mechanisms of development, including gene regulation and cell-cell signaling. In 1990 he and his wife Margaret Fuller, also a developmental geneticist, moved to Stanford University to join the newly created Department of Developmental Biology and the Department of Genetics. The research on developmental regulation expanded to explore relationships between normal embryonic development and what goes wrong in birth defects, cancer, and neurodegenerative disease. The Scott lab identified a key genetic cause of the most common human cancer and of the most common childhood malignant brain tumor. The genes and proteins involved constitute parts of the half-billion year old regulatory machinery that controls growth and shape of animals. Current projects include investigations of signaling systems, cancer and neurodegeneration, and the neural control of insulin release and growth.

Dr. Scott is co-chair of the Center for Children’s Brain Tumors at Stanford. He has served as Associate Chair and Chair of the Stanford Department of Developmental Biology. He has been president of the Society for Developmental Biology and has won the Society’s Conklin Medal. He was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996, elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1999, and elected to the National Institute of Medicine in 2007. From 2002-7 he was Chair of Bio-X, Stanford’s interdisciplinary biosciences program, and in that role organized grant and fellowship programs designed to spur collaboration across fields. He also led the organization of the Clark Center, the 750-person research center that provides a focal point for Bio-X activities. He was a founding faculty member for Stanford’s new Department of Bioengineering. He enjoys exploring wild places around the world with his family, and spends too much time on photography.