Arnold Caplan, PhD

Professor of Biology and the Director of the Skeletal Research Center, Case Western Reserve University

Arnold Caplan is a Professor of Biology and the Director of the Skeletal Research Center at Case Western Reserve University. Dr. Caplan received his B.S. in Chemistry at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Illinois; and his Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland. Dr. Caplan did a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Anatomy at The Johns Hopkins University, followed by Postdoctoral Fellowships at Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts with Dr. N. O. Kaplan and Dr. E. Zwilling. He came to Case Western Reserve University as Assistant Professor of Biology in 1969 and rose through the ranks to become Professor in 1981. He has taken three sabbatical leaves: one in 1973 as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California at San Francisco Medical School with Brian McCarthy and William Rutter; one in 1976 in the Institute de Chimie Biologique at the Faculty of Medicine de Strasbourg in the Laboratory of Pierre Chambon; and lastly, the Edna and Jacob Michael Visiting Professor of the Department of Biophysics with Nathan Sharon at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel in 1984.

He has received a number of awards including the Elizabeth Winston Lanier Award given by the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons as part of their 1990 Kappa Delta Awards Program, the 1999 Marshall R. Urist Award for Excellence in Tissue Regeneration Research given by the Orthopaedic Research Society, the Genzyme Lifetime Achievement Award given by the International Cartilage Repair Society in 2007, the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society Inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010 and is an Inaugural Member of the “Pioneers of Innovation” chosen by the Advocacy Committee of the Orthopaedic Research Society, March 2014.

He has trained over 150 researchers, has over 400 published papers and manuscripts and has long been supported by the National Institutes of Health and other non-profit and for-profit agencies for his efforts in trying to understand the development, maturation and aging and regeneration of cartilage, bone, skin and other mesenchymal tissues.