Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation

Lynn Allen-Hoffmann

Collage of photos or Lynn Allen-Hoffman and skin grown in a petri dish

Lynn Allen-Hoffmann is a pathologist, CEO and trailblazer. She is the first female UW faculty member to start a biotech company, Stratatech Corporation. In 1996 she made a remarkable discovery – a line of extraordinarily long-lived skin cells called keratinocytes obtained from discarded foreskin tissue. Even more interestingly, she found that the cells could be engineered into living tissue almost identical to “real” human skin. Inspired by the tragic story of a severally burned farmer, her work will soon be used to treat real patients.

WARF