Didier Stainier (born 1963) is a Belgian/American developmental geneticist who is currently a director at the Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research in Bad Nauheim, Germany.

During his PhD work, he investigated axon guidance and target recognition in the developing mouse with Walter Gilbert.

Subsequently, he initiated the studies on zebrafish cardiac development as a Helen Hay Whitney postdoctoral fellow with Mark Fishman at the Massachusetts General Hospital (Boston).

Together with the many students and postdocs in his laboratory, Stainier helped pioneer the use of the zebrafish model to study a wide range of questions pertaining to vertebrate organ development and function,[3] and has published extensively.

[18] He developed a number of cell ablation models that allowed him and others to gain new insights into the process of organ regeneration, with potential implications for novel disease therapies.