Stuart Newman
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Stuart Alan Newman (born April 4, 1945 in New York City) is a professor of cell biology and anatomy at New York Medical College in Valhalla, NY, United States. His research interests center around three program areas: cellular and molecular mechanisms of vertebrate limb development, physical mechanisms of morphogenesis, and mechanisms of morphological evolution. He also writes extensively about the social and cultural aspects of biological research and technology.
Newman received an A.B. from Columbia University in 1965 and a Ph.D. in chemical physics from the University of Chicago in 1970. His post-doctoral studies were at the Department of Theoretical Biology, University of Chicago (1970-71) and the School of Biological Sciences, University of Sussex, UK (1971-72). He has been a visiting professor at the Pasteur Institute, Paris, the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique-Saclay, Gif-sur-Yvette, the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, the University of Tokyo, Komaba, and was a Fogarty Senior International Fellow at Monash University, Australia. He is a Counseling Scientist of the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, Austria, an affiliated faculty member of the Biocomplexity Institute, Indiana University, Bloomington, and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Biosciences, published by the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore. He was a founding member of the Council for Responsible Genetics, Cambridge, MA and is a Fellow of the Institute on Biotechnology and the Human Future, Chicago, IL. He is also a director of the Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism, Nixon, NV.
Newman's work in developmental biology includes a proposed mechanism for patterning of the vertebrate limb skeleton based on the self-organization of embryonic tissues. He has also characterized a biophysical effect in extracellular matrices populated with cells or nonliving particles, "Matrix-Driven Translocation," that provides a physical model for morphogenesis of mesenchymal tissues.
With the evolutionary biologist Gerd B. Müller, Newman co-edited the book Origination of Organismal Form (MIT Press, 2003). This book on evolutionary developmental biology is a collection papers by various researchers on generative mechanisms that were plausibly involved in the origination of disparate body forms during the Ediacaran and early Cambrian periods. Particular attention is given to epigenetic factors, such as physical determinants and environmental parameters, that may have led to the spontaneous emergence of body plans during a period when multicellular organisms had relatively plastic morphologies. Natural selection acting on variant genotypes is suggested to have then "locked in" these body plans.
He is co-author, with the physicist Gabor Forgacs, of the textbook Biological Physics of the Developing Embryo (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
