Director of the Marine Biological Laboratory
Nipam Patel is a leading expert in modern evolutionary and developmental biology, and director of the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), affiliated with the University of Chicago.
Prior to this appointment, Patel held the William V. Power Endowed Chair in Biology and was a Professor in the Departments of Molecular and Cell Biology and Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Before that, he was a faculty member in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at the University of Chicago from 1995 to 2003, and a staff associate at the Carnegie Institution, Department of Embryology from 1991 to 1995. From 1995 to 2010, he also was an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He completed his undergraduate degree at Princeton University and received his PhD from Stanford.
Patel’s scientific expertise includes the advancement of new research organisms, through the establishment of genetic methods for their manipulation, to address several questions at the interface between development and evolution. The Patel lab works with the crustacean, Parhyale hawaiensis, to study the evolutionary diversification of body regionalization, appendage patterning, and germline regeneration. Another major area of research in the lab centers on investigating the cellular and genetic basis for structural coloration and transparency in butterflies and moths.
He is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has served on numerous advisory boards, including the board of directors of the Society for Developmental Biology.
