Todd MacfarlanDr. Macfarlan earned his PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2000, where he studied the transcriptional repressive properties of THAP domain proteins, a family of DNA binding proteins that evolved from the DNA binding domain of P-element transposases. After his PhD, Dr. Macfarlan joined the laboratory of Samuel Pfaff at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, where he demonstrated that endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) play an important role in mammalian pre-implantation development by providing regulatory sequences for an entire network of genes that are coordinately regulated by chromatin modifying factors to control embryonic potential.

Dr. Macfarlan won the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) award in 2012 for these studies. Dr. Macfarlan was then recruited to the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), NIH, in July of 2012 as part of the Earl Stadtman Investigator Program. Dr. Macfarlan was promoted to Senior Investigator at NICHD in 2019, and to Associate Scientific Director for the Division of Developmental Biology in 2023. Todd currently heads the Section on Mammalian Development and Evolution, where he explores the interplay between KRAB-Zinc finger proteins and ERVs and their impact on mammalian development and evolution.