Brian L. Black is a Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics and the Director of the Cardiovascular Research Institute at the University of California, San Francisco, USA.  He is the Distinguished Professor of Cardiovascular Biology and Medicine at UCSF.  The primary focus of the Black lab is the control of gene expression in cardiovascular development and regeneration.  His laboratory has made several seminal contributions to our understanding of heart and vascular development and to cardiac regeneration.  Black’s lab also has projects related to molecular mechanisms involved in craniofacial development and neurodegeneration.  Dr. Black received a B.S. in Biology from Furman University, a small liberal arts college in Greenville, South Carolina.  He received a Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology from Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina for his work on mechanisms of host cell shutoff by vesicular stomatitis virus.  Following his doctoral work, Dr. Black conducted postdoctoral studies with Dr. Eric Olson in Dallas, Texas, where he focused on transcriptional regulatory mechanisms in skeletal muscle, before moving to UCSF as an independent investigator in 1998.