July 31, 2023
Shawn Hingtgen, Ph.D., has been promoted to full professor in the Division of Pharmacoengineering and Molecular Pharmaceutics (DPMP) at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy. He holds a joint appointment as an assistant professor in the Department of Neurosurgery at the UNC School of Medicine.
“Being promoted to full professor is the culmination of years of hard work and dedication to the profession. It speaks to the truly amazing team and family around me that enabled this to happen. It means that I can keep innovating and translating new discoveries that have the potential to improve the lives of cancer patients. It also means I have the opportunity to be a leader, listening to and guiding students, advocating for junior faculty, and ultimately creating a culture built on fairness, honesty, trust, and respect, where the greatest minds can flourish. Being able to do this means the world to me,” said Hingtgen.
He began his scientific career while earning his Bachelor of Science from the University of Iowa. During his undergraduate studies, he performed four years of research exploring methods to reconstruct three-dimensional images of phloem as well as identifying phloem-specific proteins.
He received his Ph.D. in 2004 in anatomy and cell biology from the University of Iowa and began training as a post doctorate fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. While there, he shifted his research to developing novel stem cell-based therapeutics and molecular imaging.
Hingtgen started at the School as an assistant professor in the spring of 2012. His lab seeks to harness the potential of stem cells to develop new and better methods for treating terminal cancers, including brain, breast and lung. His team uses an integrative approach that begins with creating specially designed targeted therapeutic proteins. They then “arm” different stem cell types with the anti-cancer molecules and study the ability of stem cell-based therapies to improve both drug delivery and cancer cell killing using various small animal models of human cancer.
By bringing together the tools and techniques of molecular biology, viral vectors, targeted therapeutics, stem cell biology, and molecular imaging with highly translatable animal models, Hingtgen’s lab hopes to ultimately bring successful cell-based treatments for multiple tumor types into the clinics.
“It’s outstanding to see Shawn promoted to full professor. He has achieved such a significant amount during his tenure at Carolina and has really advanced stem cell-based therapies for glioblastoma and other cancers. He has also contributed significantly to the greater University community through his work with the Eshelman Institute for Innovation and UNC’s Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, helping them to organize collaborative teams as well as advance commercialization efforts for emerging therapies,” said Kristy Ainslie, Ph.D., chair of DPMP and Fred Eshelman Distinguished Professor.
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