chromatin and protein-DNA interactions, epigenetics, transcriptional regulation and RNA processing
PhD, Cell and Molecular Biology, University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine
Penndel, PA
Learning new things, trying to spread my enthusiasm of coding to others, bioinformatics
Benjamin (Ben) Prosser is an Associate Professor of Physiology at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. He earned his Ph.D. in Molecular Medicine under Dr. Martin Schneider at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in 2009, and then completed his post-doc in Molecular Cardiology under Dr. Jon Lederer at Maryland in 2013. Dr. Prosser started his own group at the University of Pennsylvania in 2014 with a focus on the heart and was named the Outstanding Early Career Investigator by the American Heart Association in 2017. In 2020, he became Associate Director of the historic Pennsylvania Muscle Institute as well as lead coordinator of a Leducq Trans-Atlantic Network of Excellence – an international consortium investigating the role of the cytoskeleton in heart failure. In 2021, Dr. Prosser was named a fellow of the International Society of Heart Research (ISHR) and received the Outstanding Investigator Award at the ISHR World Congress in 2022.
In 2018, Dr. Prosser’s daughter Lucy was born and diagnosed with STXBP1 encephalopathy, a rare, genetic neurodevelopmental disorder. Dr. Prosser started a separate research arm in his lab focused on developing new therapies for STXBP1 and related disorders. This work ultimately spurred the formation of the Center for Epilepsy and Neurodevelopmental Disorders (ENDD), which Dr. Prosser directs with his colleagues Drs. Beverly Davidson and Ingo Helbig of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). ENDD represents a cross-institute, interdisciplinary collaboration of fundamental, translational, and clinical researchers focused on developing genetic therapies for STXBP1, SYNGAP1, and related neurodevelopmental disorders.