Dr. Lawrence B Schook, Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professor & Director, Division of Biomedical Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Lawrence B. Schook, Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professor, serves as the Director of the Division of Biomedical, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is Professor of Animal Sciences, Bioengineering, Pathobiology, Nutritional Sciences, Pathology and Surgical Oncology. He also is a Professor in the Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB) and holds Affiliate Faculty appointments at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and the Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory. He holds an Affiliate Scientist position at Carle Foundation Hospital and is Director of the Carle/IGB Stem Cell Facility. He previously served as the Theme Leader for Regenerative Biology and Tissue Engineering at the Institute for Genomic Biology. He attended Albion College and received his Ph.D. from Wayne State School of Medicine. After postdoctoral training at the Institute for Clinical Immunology in Switzerland and the University of Michigan he has held faculty positions at the Medical College of Virginia, University of Minnesota and was a visiting Professor at the Ludwig Cancer Center at the University of Lausanne. His is a recipient of NIH, Swiss National Fund and Pardee Fellowships, was named a UIUC University Scholar, received the Funk Award for Meritorious Achievements in Agriculture, the H. H. Mitchell Award for Graduate Teaching and Research, and the Pfizer Animal Health Research Award. He is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and recipient of a Fulbright Distinguished Chair Fellowship-University of Salzburg. He has also been appointed a Fellow at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications and the Academy for Entrepreneurial Leadership.
Professor Schook has served as an advisor to corporations, universities, non-governmental and government agencies with respect to medical models, genomics and animal biotechnology. He has served on the Board of Directors for the Illinois Biotechnology Organization and the Agricultural Biotechnology International Conference Foundation and the Governing Board on Food and Agriculture at BIO. Professor Schook has also served in several key leadership roles at the USDA and NRC in animal genomics, and Chairs the Executive Steering Committee of the Alliance for Animal Genome Research and is Project Director for the International Swine Genome Sequencing Consortium. He has served as an executive with an animal genomics biotechnology company and is a consultant for life science venture capital merchant banks.
His scholarly activities have include over 200 publications, 6 edited books and is the founding editor of Animal Biotechnology. In addition to serving as the major advisor to over 30 M.S. and Ph.D. students he has mentored 15 postdoctoral fellows and 25 undergraduate students. He has received over $25 million in sponsored research from government and industry sources and his research focuses on the genetic resistance to disease, regenerative medicine, and using genomics to create animal models for biomedical research.