Staff Detail

Tom Sargent received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1975 from Indiana University and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Caltech in 1981. He was a postdoc in Igor Dawid's lab at NIH, and has been a tenured scientist in the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) since 1989. Dr. Sargent's research interests have been in vertebrate developmental biology, and he has made many contributions, including production of one of the first mammalian genomic libraries (Sargent et al., 1979), and one of the first subtracted cDNA libraries (Sargent and Dawid, 1983). Dr. Sargent and colleagues were the first to demonstrate the requirement for cell-cell communication in mesoderm formation in the frog embryo (Sargent et al., 1986), and that dissociation of frog embryonic cells could trigger neural development (Sato and Sargent, 1989). The Sargent lab discovered the role of the transcription factor AP-2 in regulating epidermal gene expression (Snape et al., 1991), the function of Eph class receptors in regulating cell adhesion (Winning et al., 1996), and the roles of the Dlx3 gene in epidermal (Morasso et al., 1996) and placental (Morasso et al., 1999) development in the mouse. His lab also showed that TFAP2 is required for induction of neural crest in Xenopus, and used this to identify downstream target genes that are important in neural crest development.  In addition to his work at NIH, Dr. Sargent has been an Associate Clinical Professor in the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at The George Washington University, in Washington, D.C. where he has taught courses in molecular biology and medical genetics.