Benjamin Ohlstein, M.D., Ph.D.

Ben Ohlstein received his bachelor’s degree in liberal arts from the University of Texas at Austin in 1989 and his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from UT Southwestern Medical Center in 2002. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Carnegie Institution in Baltimore, Maryland, in Allan C. Spradling’s laboratory in 2007. During his time in the Spradling laboratory, he demonstrated that the adult Drosophila midgut, like the adult human intestine, is maintained by multipotent stem cells and that the notch signaling pathway plays a crucial role in how stem cells give rise to enterocytes and enteroendocrine cells.

After his postdoctoral studies, Dr. Ohlstein joined Columbia University Medical Center where he was an Associate Professor of Genetics and Development and a member of the Columbia Stem Cell Initiative. He is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Faculty Scholar. In 2020, Dr. Ohlstein joined Children’s Medical Center Research Institute at UT Southwestern as an Associate Professor in Pediatrics.