Harry McNamara

Harry McNamara joins the FAS as Assistant Professor in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, and as an Investigator in the Wu Tsai Institute in January 2025. His research program uses new stem cell models to investigate how cells communicate to form multicellular patterns, forms, and functions during embryonic development. By programming cells to read and write developmental signals, his group uses stem cell models as ‘physics laboratories’ to decode and control biological self-organization in vitro. Previously, he was an independent Lewis-Sigler Scholar at Princeton and co-founded c16 Biosciences. He received his PhD in Physics from Harvard, where he was also part of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST). He also received an MSc in Bioengineering from Trinity College Dublin and an MSc in Nanotechnology from the University of Cambridge. He received his BA from Yale (Branford College), where he double majored in Physics and Ethics, Politics, and Economics.