Dr. Chad Womack

Dr. Chad Womack, Founder, President and Chair of TBED21, a non-profit organization dedicated to empowering urban centers and underserved communities through science, technology and innovation. As the President and Chair, Dr. Womack works closely with the Board to provide leadership and strategic vision for the organization, while working with executive staff to execute the organizations programmatic efforts. Dr. Womack is also the Founder and Executive Director of the Philadelphia Biotechnology and Life Sciences Institute - a non-profit initiative and project of TBED21, founded to address human capital/workforce development and bio-entrepreneurship issues for the bio-life sciences industry in the Greater Philadelphia Area. Dr. Womack has recently served as Vice President for Educational and Training Initiatives at the University City Science Center in Philadelphia. Dr. Womack is also the co-founder of NanoVec, Inc. a nanobiotechnology company and has served as its Chief Scientific Officer since its inception. He is also a co-founder, President and Chair of the National Association for Blacks in BIO (NABB), a non-profit organization dedicated to building diverse community within the biotechnology and life science industry. 

Before coming to the Science Center and the founding of TBED21 and the Philadelphia Biotechnology and Life Sciences Institute, Dr. Womack recently held the position of tenure-track Assistant Professor at the Howard University College of Medicine in Washington, D.C. Prior to his appointment at Howard University, Dr. Womack completed several research fellowships at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), most recently at the National Institutes for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Vaccine Research Center (VRC). As a NIAID research fellow and later as a senior fellow at the VRC, Dr. Womack conducted research on the immunopathogenesis of HIV/AIDS and AIDS vaccine development in developing countries, collaborating with investigators in India and Africa. Dr. Womack earned his Ph.D. from Morehouse School of Medicine while completing graduate thesis research at Harvard AIDS Institute and the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston. In addition to his thesis work, Dr. Womack was the principal investigator on a Fogarty Center funded project that resulted in the first analysis of HIV/AIDS health care utilization for HIV/AIDS patients in the city of Mumbai (Bombay), India. Upon earning his Ph.D., Dr. Womack completed a year of post-doctoral research at the Harvard AIDS Institute, where he continued his international HIV/AIDS research and collaborations in India. 

Dr. Womack is a graduate of Morehouse College earning his B.S. degree with honors in Biology and minors in Chemistry and Applied Physics, and his Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences from the Morehouse School of Medicine.