Chad Cowan received his BA and BS, with honors, from the University of Kansas. He received his PhD, from the University of Texas Southwestern at Dallas, garnering the Nominata award for most outstanding thesis. He subsequently completed a Damon Runyon postdoctoral fellowship with Professor Douglas Melton at Harvard University.  He was named a Stowers Medical Investigator in 2006 and in 2008, he became an Assistant Professor at Harvard College in the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology and in 2012 an Associate Professor at Harvard College and Harvard Medical School. His last academic appointment was as an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School in the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine, Department of Medicine, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He was a Member of the Broad Institute and a Principal Faculty member of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute where he directed the Diabetes Disease Program and the iPS Cell Core Facility. Professor Cowan has led or been a member of several large efforts to utilize stem cells to better understand disease, including the NHLBI’s Next Gen iPS Cell Project and the Progenitor Cell Biology Consortium. In 2013, Professor Cowan received a Transformative Research Award from the NIH to use pioneering gene editing tools to better understand complex genetic disease. Professor Cowan commercialized his research in this area as co-founder and Head of Research at CRISPR Therapeutics. He later founded and served as Chief Scientific Officer at Sana Biotechnology. Most recently, he founded and served as Chief Executive Officer of Clade Therapeutics which was acquisition by Century Therapeutics in April 2024.  He is currently an Executive Scientific Advisor at Century Therapeutics.