Dr. Stedman is an accomplished surgeon-scientist, cell and molecular biologist, and a medical device and biopharmaceutical inventor. He holds an SB in Chemistry and Biology from MIT and an MD from Harvard. He is currently a tenured Professor of Surgery at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a recipient of over 25 million dollars in extramural and NIH funding since 1986 with multiple high-profile publications in Nature, Nature Medicine, and Circulation. Dr. Stedman was the PI on the first AAV gene therapy clinical trial for Limb Girdle Muscular Dystrophy (LGMD) in 1999 and has dedicated the balance of his career to finding a cure for DMD. He holds several patents related to DMD, gene therapy and various medical devices and is currently the overall program PI on a recently awarded NIH U01 URGenT Grant, IND-enabling studies of non-immunogenic gene therapy for ultra-rare DMD patients excluded from dystrophin trials. This consortium award between StrongHolt Therapeutics, University of Pennsylvania, and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia will fund StrongHolt’s SH-0322 gene therapy for DMD through IND and into the clinic.