Professor Dr. Mario Capecchi PhD

Professor dr. Mario Capecchi was born in Verona, Italy in 1937. He received his B.S. degree in chemistry and physics from Antioch College in 1961 and his Ph.D. degree in biophysics from Harvard University in 1967. His thesis work, under the guidance of Dr. James D. Watson, included the analysis of the mechanisms of nonsense suppression. From 1967 till 1969 Dr. Capecchi was a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. In 1969 he became an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry, Harvard School of Medicine. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1971. In 1973 he joined the faculty at the University of Utah as a Professor of Biology. Since 1988 Dr. Capecchi has been an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and since 1989 a Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Utah School of Medicine. Since 1993 he has been Distinguished Professor of Human Genetics and Biology. He is also co-chairman of the Department of Human Genetics.

Dr. Capecchi is best known for his pioneering work on the development of gene targeting in mouse embryo-derived stem cells. Dr. Capecchi has won numerous awards, including the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 2007 with Oliver Smithies and Martin Evans for discovering a method for introducing homologous recombination in mice employing embryonic stem cells.