Professor & Chair, Department of Genetic and Cellular Medicine, UMass Chan Medical School 

Dr. Guangping Gao is the founding chair of Department of Genetic & Cellular Medicine (formerly the Horae Gene Therapy Center) and Penelope Booth Rockwell Professor in Biomedical Research at UMass Chan Medical School, as well as the director of the Li Weibo Institute for Rare Diseases Research.

He is an internationally well recognized gene therapy researcher who has played a key role in the discovery and characterization of new family of AAV serotypes, which was instrumental in reviving the gene therapy field, hugely impacting many currently untreatable human diseases. For 30+ years of his scientific research career, Dr. Gao has primarily focused on molecular genetics and viral vector gene therapy of rare genetic diseases.