Wenchao Song, PhD

Wenchao Song, Ph.D., is a Professor of Pharmacology in the Department of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania (Penn). He completed college education in China before pursuing graduate studies in the UK under the auspices of a British Council scholarship. He received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Wales, Bangor (Bangor University) and subsequently conducted postdoctoral studies in the Division of Clinical Pharmacology at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, TN. He joined the Pharmacology faculty at Penn Medicine in 1995 and is a member of both the pharmacology and immunology graduate groups.

Dr. Song is an internationally renowned expert on complement biology. His research group pioneered studies of mouse models of complement-mediated diseases. Their work has helped reveal fundamental knowledge of how complement is regulated in vivo, with translational relevance to anti-complement therapeutics. He has been recognized as an Established Investigator of the American Heart Association and is a recipient of the Lady Barbra Colyton Prize in Autoimmune Disease Research. He has provided numerous editorial services for many top scientific journals and served on grant review panels on domestic and international funding agencies including the NIH. He also chaired the organizing committee of the XXI International Complement Workshop and was elected and served both as a Councilor and Treasurer of the International Complement Society from 2006-2016. He is a co-inventor of many patents and had co-founded 3 start-up companies developing anti-complement therapeutics.