Kostandin Pajcini earned his B.S in Microbiology from the University of Pittsburgh. He completed his graduate training in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University in the laboratory of Helen M. Blau Ph.D. then moved on to conduct research in the field of hematopoietic development and disorders as a post-doc in the laboratory of Warren Pear at the University of Pennsylvania. Currently, Kostandin is a Principal Investigator and Associate Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He continues to conduct research in hematopoietic development and uses multidisciplinary genetic studies and transgenic mouse models of the cell signaling pathways to discover the regulation of rapid HSC self-renewal in the fetal liver as well as the regulation of differentiation potential of post-natal stem cells in the bone marrow niche.