Dr. Blackwell was born in Greenville, SC.  He received his BS degree in Chemistry from Duke University in 1978, and MD and PhD degrees from Columbia University in 1987 and 1988, respectively. Dr. Blackwell performed his graduate work with Dr. Frederick W. Alt, studying how B- and T-cell antigen receptor genes are assembled. 

In 1989 he joined the lab of the late Dr. Harold Weintraub (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA) as a postdoctoral fellow of the Life Sciences Research Foundation. He then developed high-throughput systems for analyzing protein-nucleic acid interactions and studied how regulatory proteins recognize DNA.  This work eventually established the direction for his current work, investigating gene regulatory mechanisms involved in the development, metabolism, stress defense, and aging. 

In 1993 he became a Junior Investigator at the Center for Blood Research (now Immune Disease Institute or IDI, a medical research center affiliated academically with Harvard Medical School and focused on inflammation and the immune response), and an Assistant Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Blackwell was promoted to Associate Professor in 2001, and Professor in 2008. He was named a Searle Scholar in 1995, and an Ellison Medical Foundation Senior Scholar in Aging in 2010. He has participated in numerous review panels at the NIH, and is a member of the editorial board of the journal Aging Cell.