Judith Swain

The Scientist JUDITH SWAIN, Chief of the division of cardiovascular medicine and professor of genetics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

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Along with creating a health care network for cardiovascular medicine at Penn, Judith Swain is deeply involved in two research projects that hold promise for treating heart patients and others with muscular and skeletal diseases. She is working on understanding how muscle becomes muscle at the genetic and developmental levels with the goal of discovering ways to cause muscle cells to regenerate. And her team is advancing knowledge of fibroblast growth factor (FGF) and its effects on cardiac and skeletal muscle in hopes of developing genetic therapies.

Swain says her work on parental imprinting, done while on...