Professor Garry Nolan

Dr. Nolan is the Rachford and Carlota A. Harris Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University School of Medicine. He trained with Leonard Herzenberg (for his Ph.D.) and Nobelist Dr. David Baltimore (for postdoctoral work for the first cloning/characterization of NF-κB p65/ RelA and the development of rapid retroviral production systems). He has published over 180 research articles and is the holder of 17 US patents, and has been honored as one of the top 25 inventors at Stanford University.

Dr. Nolan is the first recipient of the Teal Innovator Award (2012) from the Department of Defense (a $3.3 million grant for advanced studies in ovarian cancer), the first recipient of an FDA BAAA, for “Bio-agent protection” grant, $3million, from the FDA for a “Cross-Species Immune System Reference”, and received the award for “Outstanding Research Achievement in 2011” from the Nature Publishing Group for his development of CyTOF applications in the immune system.

Dr. Nolan is an outspoken proponent of translating public investment in basic research to serve public welfare. Dr. Nolan was the founder of Rigel Inc. (NASDAQ: RIGL), and Nodality, Inc. (a diagnostics development company), BINA (a genomics computational infrastructure company, and serves on the Boards of Directors of several companies as well as consults for other biotechnology companies. DVS Sciences, on which he was Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board, recently sold to Fluidigm for $207 million dollars (1/2014) on an investment of $14 million.

His areas of research include hematopoiesis, cancer and leukemia, autoimmunity and inflammation, and computational approaches for network and systems immunology. Dr. Nolan’s most recent efforts are focused on a single cell analysis advance using a mass spectrometry-flow cytometry hybrid device, the so- call “CyTOF”. The approach uses an advanced ion plasma source to determine the levels of tagged reagents bound to cells—enabling a vast increase in the number of parameters that can be measured per cell.

His laboratory has already begun a large scale mapping of the hematopoietic hierarchy in healthy human bone marrow at an unprecedented level of detail. Dr. Nolan’s efforts are to enable a deeper understanding not only of normal immune function, trauma, and other inflammatory events but also detailed substructures of leukemias and solid cancers—which will enable wholly new understandings that will enable better management of disease and clinical outcomes.