Anthony Atala, MD, Director and Chair

Anthony Atala, MD, is the Director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and the W.H. Boyce Professor and chair of the Department of Urology at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. Dr. Atala is a practicing surgeon and a researcher in the area of regenerative medicine. His current work focuses on growing new human cells, tissues and organs.

Dr. Atala works with several journals and serves in various roles, including Editor-in-Chief of Current Stem Cell Research and Therapy, and Therapeutic Advances in Urology; as Associate Editor of Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, The Journal of Rejuvenation Research, Nanotechnology in Engineering and Medicine, Gene Therapy and Regulation, and Current Reviews in Urology; as Executive Board Member or Section Editor of the journal Tissue Engineering and International Journal of Artificial Organs, and as Editorial Board member of the International Journal of Stem Cells, Stem Cell Review Letters, Expert Opinion on Biological Therapy, Biomedical Materials, the Journal of the American College of Surgeons, the Journal of Urology, BioMed Central-Urology, Urology, and Current Opinion in Urology.

Dr. Atala is a recipient of the US Congress funded Christopher Columbus Foundation Award, bestowed on a living American who is currently working on a discovery that will significantly affect society, and the Gold Cystoscope Award for advances in his field. Dr. Atala was named by Scientific American as a Medical Treatments Leader of the Year for his contributions to the fields of cell, tissue and organ regeneration. In 2006, he was named by Fast Company magazine as one of 50 people who “will change how we work and live over the next 10 years, his work was listed as Discover Magazine`s Number 1 Top Science Story of the Year in the field of medicine, and as Time Magazine’s top 10 medical breakthroughs of the year in 2007. A Time Magazine poll ranked Dr. Atala as the 56th most influential person of the year in 2007. Esquire Magazine in 2008 named Dr. Atala one of the 75 most influential persons of the 21st century.

Dr. Atala has led or served several national professional and government committees, including the National Institutes of Health working group on Cells and Developmental Biology, and the National Institutes of Health Bioengineering Consortium. He is currently an NIH “Quantum Grant” awardee. The Wake Forest Institute of Regenerative medicine has a team of over 160 physicians and researchers. Ten applications of technologies developed in Dr. Atala's laboratory have been used clinically. He is the editor of 8 books, including Methods of Tissue Engineering, Principles of Regenerative Medicine, and Minimally Invasive Urology, and has published more than 250 journal articles and has applied for or received over 200 national and international patents.