About the PI

Arndt F. Siekmann, PhD is an Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and a faculty member in the Cell and Developmental Biology Department. He is also a Principal Investigator at the Cardiovascular Institute. Dr. Siekmann earned his PhD from the University of Technology in Dresden, Germany, where he worked in the laboratory of Dr. Michael Brand at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics. He did his postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Dr. Nathan Lawson at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, USA. He then became a Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine in Münster, Germany before joining the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Siekmann’s research focuses on the development of the vasculature, and he has made important contributions to our understanding of artery formation and the role of chemokine signaling during this process. More recent work focuses on the role that hemodynamic forces play in determining blood vessel sizes and the correct patterning of hierarchically organized blood vessel networks. Here, work from his lab has shown that endothelial cells adopt their shapes to achieve proper blood vessel size control, a mechanism that relies on endoglin function, a gene mutated in some patients with hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia (HHT). This work has been published in high-impact journals, such as Nature Cell Biology, Nature Communications, and Development.

Dr. Siekmann has trained seven graduate students to date, with many of them continuing their careers in science at renowned universities, including Yale and Harvard. Dr. Siekmann has also supervised 5 postdoctoral researchers, with 2 trainees currently in his laboratory. He is a member of the Cell and Molecular Biology Graduate Group and of the Bioengineering Graduate Program.