Mark Eckert, PhD

Dr. Mark Eckert is a research assistant professor in the Section of Gynecologic Oncology, Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Chicago. He studied chemistry and biochemistry as an undergraduate at North Carolina State University before beginning his graduate work in Molecular Pathology in the laboratory of Dr. Jing Yang at the University of California, San Diego. There his research focused on the transcriptional regulation of breast cancer metastasis. After obtaining his Ph.D., he focused on understanding the genomics and proteomics of ovarian cancer metastasis in the laboratory of Dr. Ernst Lengyel at the University of Chicago. This has included a study that elucidated the genomics of ovarian cancer initiation and metastasis and the proteomic identification of the methyltransferase nicotinamide N-methyltransferase (NNMT) as a metabolic regulator of stromal epigenetics. With the support of the Ovarian Cancer Research Alliance, his work will focus on understanding the fate of adipocytes in the tumor microenvironment using a combination of lineage tracing mouse models and single-cell transcriptomics. Dr. Eckert has published his work in Nature, Cancer Cell, Nature Cell Biology, and Cancer Discovery, among others. He was a recipient of a Marsha Rivkin Foundation for Ovarian Cancer Research Scientific Scholar Award, a Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program Graduate Research Fellowship, and was a Howard Hughes Med-into-Grad Initiative Fellow. Dr. Eckert is currently co-PI of a Chan Zuckerberg Human Cell Atlas Seed Network to map the cells present in the normal female reproductive tract with Drs. Ernst Lengyel, Anindita Basu, and Mengjie Chen at the University of Chicago.