Bio:

Mark Martindale is Director of the University of Florida's Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience and Professor in the Department of Biology. He obtained his Ph.D. in zoology at the University of Texas at Austin (1985). His dissertation focused on the role of embryogenesis on the regenerative properties of a group of marine animals called ctenophores. One of the major findings was that congenital morphological abnormalities arising during development could be "cured" during adulthood if a proper regenerative response was initiated. Martindale went on to perform additional experimental work on ctenophores, including generating the embryonic fate map of Mnemiopsis leidyi using intracellular injection of lineage tracers through the 60-cell stage. Subsequently, Martindale was part of the leadership teams that sequenced the first ctenophore genome and provided the first molecular evidence supporting ctenophores as the earliest diverging extant animals (an ongoing debate in the Tree of Life). In 2009, Martindale was awarded the Alexander Kowalevsky Medal for Comparative Embryology by the St. Petersburg Society of Naturalists. In 2010, Dr. Martindale along with Dr. Max Telford founded EvoDevo, the first open access journal in the field of the evolution of development, and served as its co-editor-in-chief for 10 years. Dr. Martindale has broad training in integrative biology and has published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers on a wide variety of topics in some 15 animal phyla, with an emphasis on embryogenesis and regeneration in marine invertebrates.