William Stanford

Scientist

Role: Scientist

Site: CDL-Toronto

William (Bill) L. Stanford, PhD, is trained as a chemist (Duke) and an immunologist (UNC at Chapel Hill), moving to Canada for a postdoc with Alan Bernstein in stem cell biology and genetics. In 2002, Dr. Stanford established his lab at the University of Toronto (Biomedical Engineering), where he applied interdisciplinary approaches including molecular genetics and systems biology to stem cell research and tissue engineering as a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Stem Cell Engineering and Functional Genomics. Following a sabbatical in systems genetics at the Institute for Systems Biology with Lee Hood and David Galas, Dr. Stanford moved his lab in 2011 to the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute (OHRI) to facilitate translational research growing out of his basic research program. Dr. Stanford is currently a senior scientist at the Sprott Centre for Stem Cell Research at the OHRI, a full professor at the University of Ottawa, investigator at the Ottawa Institute of Systems Biology, director of the Ottawa Human Pluripotent Stem Cell Facility, co-director of the High Content Imaging Core Facility at the OHRI, and a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Integrative Stem Cell Biology. Dr. Stanford uses a combination of unbiased systems and reductionist methodologies to dissect the molecular control of cell fate decisions in the context of human development, aging, and disease, with a focus on developing new therapeutic approaches for a variety of diseases including cancer.

Dr. Stanford is internationally renowned for his contributions to many fields including his pioneering work to map gene regulatory networks in pluripotent stem cells, use of gene trap mutagenesis and high throughput gene targeting to functionally annotate the mammalian genome and model human disease, discovering a new member of the polycomb repressive complex 2 required for stem cell function, functionally analyzing the stem cell protein Sca-1, demonstrating that defective self-renewal of mesenchymal stem/stromal cells leads to age-related osteoporosis, and developing the first non-transformed model of the tuberous sclerosis-related cancer lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM). Dr. Stanford has published over 100 manuscripts, which have been cited about 9000 times in other research publications.