Stan Gronthos is a National Health and Medical Research Principal Research Fellow. His research specialty is in stem cell biology and regenerative medicine. He is the founder and head of the Mesenchymal Stem Cell Laboratory in the School of Medicine at Faculty of Health Sciences of the University of Adelaide in Australia.

The lab’s focus is the investigation of the origin and the biological properties of different postnatal mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) populations that give rise to supportive connective tissues such as myelo-supportive stroma, adipose tissue, smooth muscle, cardiac muscle, bone, cartilage, ligament, cementum and dentin. They seek to identify critical genes and epigenetic factors that regulate MSC self-renewal, proliferation and differentiation as well as the factors central to MSC mediated regulation of haematopiesis, angiogenesis and immune cell modulation.

S. Gronthos’ research will help develop more effective and safer stem cell based therapeutic options in the future for a wide variety of clinical diseases and conditions.

In 1999, he received his Ph.D. from the Department of Orthopaedics Surgery and Trauma at the Faculty of Health Science of the University of Adelaide.

For the period 1999-2001 he was a research fellow at the Institute of Dental & Craniofacial Research at the National Institutes of Health of Bethesda, in the United States, at the laboratory of Dr. Pamela GehronRobey. There he published several seminal publications describing the identification of purified populations of mesenchymal stem cells from bone marrow, adipose and dental tissues.

In 2002, he founded the Mesenchymal Stem Cell Laboratory within the Division of Haematology at the IMVS/Hanson Institute and in 2014 he relocated his laboratory as a University of Adelaide representative into the newly built South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute (SAHMRI).

Stan Gronthos has received numerous awards. Some of them are the 2004 NHMRC R.D. Wright Fellowship, the 2008 NHMRC Senior Research Fellowship Level A and the 2013 NHMRC Principal Research Fellowship. He also holds more than 35 patents applications that are pending as well as patents that have already been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).