Frank Staal | Professor of Molecular Stem Cell Biology
Leiden University Medical Center (Netherlands)

Frank Staal was trained in biomedicine at the Faculty of Medicine of Utrecht University, the Netherlands. He obtained both his Bachelor and Master degrees cum laude from this university and then moved to Stanford University, CA USA, for his PhD degree in Genetics under supervision of the late Leonard Herzenberg and his wife Leonore Herzenberg . His thesis work involved fundamental and translational aspects of HIV disease. His first postdoctoral work focused on human T cell development, which he extended to genetic mouse models in his second postdoctoral period as fellow of the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences under guidance of  Hans Clevers, where he started to work on Wnt signalling. He was recruited by Erasmus Medical School in 2000 to start his own lab focusing on mouse and human T cell development. During this period at ErasmusMC, Rotterdam, he got interested in gene therapy for SCID, a disease in babies in which T cell development is blocked due to inherited mutations in key developmental genes. In 2007 he was appointed full professor at Leiden University Medical School and moved his lab from Rotterdam to Leiden. He is currently focusing on clinical implementation of gene therapy for RAG-SCID, other gene therapy approaches with blood stem cells and basic stem and T cell biology. Fittingly, his appointment is in the Department of Immunohematology, where the late Jon van Rood performed the first bone marrow transplantation for SCID exactly 50 years ago.