Mark Schlissel

Dr. Mark S. Schlissel is a graduate of Princeton University (A.B., summa cum laude, 1979, Biochemical Sciences), he earned both M.D. and Ph.D. degrees at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (1986, Physiological Chemistry). He did his residency training in internal medicine at Hopkins Hospital and conducted postdoctoral research as a Bristol-Myers Cancer Research Fellow under David Baltimore at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Whitehead Institute.

He began his career as a faculty member at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1991, where he earned a number of awards and fellowships for his research and teaching. He moved to the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California–Berkeley in 1999 as associate professor, advancing to full professor in 2002. He taught undergraduate and graduate courses in immunology as well as a large introductory course in biology for life science majors.

His research has focused on the developmental biology of B lymphocytes, the cell type in the immune system that secretes antibodies. His work has contributed to a detailed understanding of genetic factors involved in the production of antibodies and how mistakes in that process can lead to leukemia and lymphoma. He is the author or co-author of over 100 scientific papers and has trained 21 successful doctoral candidates in his lab.

He served as the University of Michigan's President from 2014 to 2022, prior to which he was UC-Berkeley’s dean of biological sciences in the College of Letters & Science and held the C.H. Li Chair in Biochemistry until his appointment as Brown’s provost in 2011. He served as vice chair of theUC-Berkeley Molecular and Cell Biology Department from 2002-07.

Nationally, he has served as member and chair of the Immunobiology Study Section at the National Institutes of Health and on the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Scientific Review Board.

He was elected to the American Society of Clinical Investigators in 1998 and the American Association of Physicians in 2013. He has been a member of the American Association of Immunologists since 1992 and was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2013.