Cell scientist to watch – Mitchell Guttman

Abstract

Mitchell received a bachelor's degree in molecular and computational biology and a master's degree in computational biology and bioinformatics from the University of Pennsylvania. He then joined the laboratory of Eric Lander at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and was awarded his PhD in 2012. The same year he was named in the Forbes ‘30 under 30: science and healthcare’ list of rising stars and received an NIH early independence award. Mitchell subsequently moved to the California Institute of Technology as an Assistant Professor to establish his own laboratory. He has received numerous awards, including being named a Robertson Investigator of the New York Stem Cell Foundation, an Investigator at the Heritage Medical Research Institute and a Pew-Stewart scholar for cancer research in 2015. Having identified and characterised a new class of functional large non-coding RNA (lncRNA) genes, his laboratory aims to understand the mechanisms by which lncRNAs act to control cellular functions through regulation of proteins, binding to genomic DNA targets and contributing to nuclear organisation.