Bio:

Dr. Frederick “Chris” Bennett is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, and Neurology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. During his postdoctoral training with Ben Barres at Stanford University he created methods to transplant resident macrophages into tissues, and used them to elucidate unique properties of microglia, the brain’s resident macrophages, compared to their counterparts in the blood and body. In his own laboratory, he extends these findings to pursue two related goals: 1) to understand how resident macrophages and their tissue environment regulate each other and 2) to apply these fundamental discoveries to engineering therapeutic macrophages that correct tissue dysfunction, particularly of the brain. Dr, Bennett received a career transition award from the NIH, the Whitehall Fellowship, and the AFAR junior investigator award. He is a residency trained psychiatrist and maintains a small clinical practice that greatly enhances his scientific creativity.