Henry M. Kronenberg

Biosketch

Henry M. Kronenberg is a physician/scientist in the Endocrine Unit at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School. Dr. Kronenberg received his BA from Harvard University, his MD from Columbia University, his medical house officer training at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and post-doctoral training at NIH, MIT, and the MGH.

Dr. Kronenberg served for many years as Chief of the Endocrine Unit and Endocrine Division in the Department of Medicine at the MGH. He has served as President of the Endocrine Society, the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research and the International Bone and Mineral Society. He has won the Fuller Albright Young Investigator Award, the William F. Neuman Award, and the Rodan Mentoring Award of the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research, the Copp Award of the International Bone and Mineral Society, and the Gerald D. Aurbach Lecture Award of the Endocrine Society.

Research Interests

Dr. Kronenberg leads a research group that studies the actions of parathyroid hormone and parathyroid hormone-related protein, with a particular emphasis on bone development, the osteoblast lineage, calcium homeostasis, and the roles of osteoblast lineage cells in hematopoiesis. He cloned cDNA and genomic DNA encoding PTH and, with collaborators, cloned DNA encoding the PTH/PTHrP receptor. He showed that PTHrP, in vivo, regulates the differentiation of growth plate chondrocytes and, with collaborators, established the feedback loop between PTHrP and Indian hedgehog as a key regulator of bone growth. With collaborators, he showed that cells of the osteoblast lineage regulate hematopoietic stem cells and their descendants, partly through PTH/PTHrP action. Dr. Kronenberg’s laboratory in recent years has used a number of genetically altered strains of mice to establish the roles of signaling by the PTH/PTHrP receptor in early cells of the osteoblast lineage. He has used lineage tracing to identify osteoblast precursors in vivo. He uses single cell RNA sequencing to identify clusters of cells in the growth plate and bone marrow that constitute various paths along the osteoblast/stromal cell/adipocyte lineage.