Michael T. Longaker earned his undergraduate degree at Michigan State University, (where he played varsity basketball and was a member of the 1979 NCAA Men's Basketball Championship Team) and his medical degree at Harvard Medical School. He completed his surgical residency at the University of California, San Francisco, a residency in Plastic Surgery at NYU and a craniofacial fellowship at UCLA. The majority of his research training took place while he was a Post Doctoral Research Fellow in the Fetal Treatment Program under Dr. Michael Harrison and in the laboratory of Dr. Michael Banda in Radiobiology, both at UCSF. In December 2003, Dr. Longaker earned his M.B.A. from University of California – Berkeley and Columbia University in the inaugural class of their combined program. He was elected into Beta Gamma Sigma at Columbia Business School. Michael Longaker's research experience focuses on wound repair and fibrosis, with specific applications to the different systems between fetal and post-natal wound healing. His research has opened up two fields: fibroblasts heterogeneity / regeneration during wound repair and skeletal stem cells. He made the discovery that embryos heal without a scar early in gestation and transition to scarring late in gestation while as a post-doc at UCSF. Over the past three decades he has worked out how mechanical forces promote scarring in adult animals. His laboratory identified the fibroblast lineage responsible for scarring in mouse dorsal wounds (Science, 2015). Most recently, he achieved true regeneration without scarring during adult mouse wound healing and has worked out mechanisms through which this occurs (Science, 2021; Science Translational Medicine 2021; Cell Stem Cell, 2022; Cell Stem Cell 2022; Science 2023; Cell Stem Cell, 2023; Cell Stem Cell 2025; Science Translational Medicine 2025; Science Translational Medicine 2025). Beyond wound healing, he is also an international leader in tissue and organ fibrosis, publishing work in a range of organ systems: foreign body response (Nature Biomedical Engineering, 2025), lung (Nature, 2025), intra-abdominal adhesions (Nature Communications, 2020; Science Translational Medicine 2025), and Crohn's disease (Cell, 2025). His laboratory identified mouse skeletal stem cells in 2015 (Cell) and human skeletal stem cells in 2018 (Cell). He would show how skeletal stem cells are expanded during fracture repair (PNAS, 2015), are impacted by diabetes (Science Translational Medicine, 2017) and can be guided toward cartilage regeneration following microfracture surgery (Nature Medicine, 2020). He has shown that skeletal stem cells in the jaw can be activated by mechanical forces and revert back to a cranial neural crest fate during jaw regeneration (Nature, 2018). Most recently, he has shown that osteoporotic fractures can be rescued with local therapy to heal in a youthful like manner (Nature, 2021). He has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Medallion for Scientific Achievement and the Flance-Karl Award from the American Surgical Association, Lifetime Achievement Award, Society of University Surgeons; Dedication of Owen Wangensteen Scientific Forum, American College of Surgeons, and Jonathan A. Rhoads Medal for Distinguished Service to Medicine; American Philosophical Society, College of Physicians of Philadelphia, and University of Pennsylvania Department of Surgery. He is a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation, Association for American Physicians, and the National Academy of Medicine. He has published over 1400 papers, his manuscripts have been cited over 100,000 times. He is an inventor on over 100 issued or applied for patents and patent applications. He has also funded several venture-backed start-up companies, including Neodyne Biosciences and Arresto Biosciences, which was acquired by Gilead (NASDAQ:GILD) in January 2011. He is a founding partner of Tautona Group, an early-stage life science fund that has created novel biomedical technologies that have been sold to industry leading companies, such as Allergan (NYSE:AGN), Novadaq (NASDAQ:NVDQ), and Acelity/KCI (San Antonio, TX).