Biography

Dr. M. Amin Arnaout is Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Principal Investigator at Harvard Stem Cell Institute and Physician at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He served as Chief of the Division of Nephrology at the Massachusetts General Hospital for 15 years, building it from a footnote division to the country’s premier center for research, training, and patient care in nephrology.

Dr. Arnaout made seminal contributions to basic and translational medical research for over three decades, and continue to lead an active laboratory today. His first major achievement was his discovery in 1982 of a new disease in humans, leukocyte adhesion deficiency. After defining the entity, he identified its genetic basis, cloned the defective genes, which encode cell surface receptors we now know as integrins; elucidated the role of integrins in leukocyte adhesion, and determined their three-dimensional structures by X-ray crystallography and electron microscopy. These achievements have been hailed as fundamental advances in the pages of Science and Nature journals (Nature Struc Biol, ’98; Science 2001; Science 2001; Nature Reviews, 2002) and in the lay press (NewYork Times, 1993; Harvard Gazette, 2014).

Dr. Arnaout also made significant contributions in other scientific fields. These include identifying the autoantigen in Wegener’s Granulomtaosis; demonstrating that one of the two defective genes in autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease encodes a TRP-like calcium channel; elucidating the roles of the transcription factor ZBP-89 in hematopoietic stem cell differentiation, and developing microfluidic kidney devices that may find utility in hemodialysis. His research was continuously supported by the National Institutes of Health since 1982.