Dr. Macarak received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in Cell Biology. His research interest in fibrosis came as a result of his association with the Connective Tissue Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania whose director was Dr. Nicholas A. Kefalides and where his laboratory was located for 14 years. He subsequently became Professor and Chairman of the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology at the University of Pennsylvania where he had a joint appointment in the Bioengineering department. During this time, he developed several pieces of equipment to apply mechanical forces to cells in vitro and has multiple patents including one on this system. He and several of his co-workers were awarded the Melville medal in 1995 which is the highest American Society of Mechanical Engineers honor for the best original paper (not published elsewhere) which has been published in the ASME Transactions during the two calendar years immediately preceding the year of the award. Other honors include Best Paper of the Year awarded by the Bioengineering Division of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the William Stickel Gold Award from the American Podiatric Medical Association and the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. Ed, in association with Dr. Pamela Howard, directed the research program in Pediatric Urology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia for nine years whose main focus was bladder fibrosis in children. In 2013, he moved to Thomas Jefferson University to join Joel Rosenbloom at the Fibrosis Center where he is Professor of Dermatology and Cutaneous Biology. One focus of his research program at the Fibrosis Center is to investigate the role of mechanical force in altering the phenotype of cells derived from human keloid tissue.
