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The long-term vision of the Iyer Stem Cell & Regeneration Lab is to exploit advances in stem cell biology and emerging engineering technologies to develop personalized therapeutic strategies for neural repair. We focus on using human pluripotent stem cells to determine how regional and phenotypic specificity drives neural circuit formation, degeneration, and regeneration in the spinal cord and beyond.

News & Upcoming Events

June 2026

June 4, 2026

Milestone achieved! A huge congratulations to our first-year BME PhD students — Maddie, Izzy, Julian, and Zhixin — who all passed their qualifying exams this week! We're proud of your hard work and are excited to see research progress onward and upward across so many growing lab research areas!

May 2026

May 16, 2026

Congrats to our graduating lab members! We're so proud to send off our graduating seniors — Hannah, Farsin, Kara, Rola, and Layla — and wish them all the best in their next chapters. A special shoutout to our capstone team, who took home the People's Choice Award for their work developing a low-cost nucleofection buffer for hiPSC gene editing. Well deserved! Congratulations as well to India and Dami, who both completed their Master's degrees in Biomedical Engineering. We're lucky to have had all of you in the lab!

May 6, 2026

Nisha @ Tufts in Translation: Drug Discovery & Design. Nisha presented new hiPSC tools from the lab at LabCentral in Cambridge. Tufts in Translation spotlights faculty advancing new therapeutic approaches, targets, platforms, and delivery systems. Sessions feature early-stage research across the drug discovery and design landscape, with an emphasis on translational potential and industry relevance.

May 4, 2026

Milestone achieved! Congrats to Nicole Teaney on passing her Neuroscience qualifying exams this afternoon! Thanks to her committee for their thoughtful feedback as she advances in her PhD candidacy, developing new methods and models for spinal oligodendrocytes.

May 1, 2026

Master’s thesis defended! Congrats to India Cabot on successfully defending her master’s thesis! Over the past two years, India has developed new methods to systematically differentiate Schwann cells from our novel neural crest precursors, while integrating cryopreservation strategies to improve usability across long differentiation workflows.

April 2026

April 30, 2026

Senior thesis defended! Congrats to Hannah Goldberg on successfully defending her senior thesis! Hannah contributed new workflows for generating astrocyte progenitors using transcriptional reprogramming, adding valuable tools to the lab’s research toolkit.

April 24, 2026

We are celebrating! Congratulations to Julian on winning a Tufts Graduate Student Research Competition award! He will be using the funds to develop new methods to generate adrenal cells.

April 21, 2026

New Tufts Neuroengineeing Pilot Grants! We’re excited to share that we’ve received pilot funding to launch two new collaborative projects with colleagues in BME and Tufts Neuroscience.

In one project, we will develop new patient-derived hiPSC models for CTNNB1 syndrome in collaboration with Michele Jacob and Malavika Raman, and characterize how proteomic differences across patient cells may contribute to variation in disease severity.

In a second project, we will characterize spinal glia derived from ALS mutant hiPSCs and assess whether we can capture the onset of metabolic maladaptations using live imaging.

April 13, 2026

Poster award! Congrats to Nicole Teaney on earning 3rd place in the poster competition at the Tufts Department of Neuroscience retreat!

April 1, 2026

New Springboard Award! We’re excited to share that our lab has received a Tufts Springboard award in collaboration with Malavika Raman’s lab at Tufts School of Medicine. This project will focus on developing new stem cell models for ALS to investigate differences in upper vs. lower motor neuron disease susceptibility, with a particular emphasis on protein quality control mechanisms.

March 2026

March 26, 2026

New Laidlaw Scholars! Congrats to our undergrads Lucy Moss and Lauren Stoller who have both been accepted to the Tufts Laidlaw Scholars Program! The Laidlaw Scholars Program is a prestigious 18-month leadership program that supports students through funded research and service-learning experiences.

This summer, Lucy will continue her research investigating how environmental cues influence microglia, while Lauren will begin new work focused on engineering stem cell models for ALS.

March 25, 2026

Milestone achieved! Congrats to Natalie Parker on passing her Original Research Proposal exam on her path to a PhD! Her project combines stem cells with synthetic biology in new ways for our lab, and her committee offered valuable feedback to support her ambitious work!

March 19, 2026

Undergraduate Achievement Awards! Big congratulations to several senior undergraduate members of the Iyer lab who have been selected to received Tufts Achievement Awards in recognition of not only their research contributions but broader leadership and impact at the university!

Kara Moquin -- Class of 1942 Prize (Awarded to seniors considered most likely to become outstanding university teachers, counselors or administrators.)
Layla Shaffer-- Prize of the Class of 1882 (Honors an undergraduate student with great potential for intellectual leadership and creativity.)
Hannah Goldberg--Benjamin G. Brown Prize (Awarded to seniors who have shown promise in scientific research fields other than chemistry)

March 12, 2026

New publication! Published in Tissue Engineering Part C, our new manuscript " Low-Cost, Rapid Fabrication of Customizable Polyethylene Glycol-Based Cell Culture Devices" describes an SLA 3D-printing method to make PEG devices for hPSC-derived neuron co-cultures. Check it out here!

It is the first-first author publication for PhD student Emily Pallack, and the first publication for several of the Tufts undergraduates and alums who contributed to this project, Max, Yan, Hannah, Aneth, Noah, and Faith! Congrats all!

March 8, 2026

Julian Chow Awarded Croucher Foundation Scholarship! Huge congratulations to 1st year BME PhD student Julian Chow, who was selected for the Croucher Scholarship for Doctoral Study! Administered by the Croucher Foundation to foster promising scientific talent from Hong Kong, this award will support Julian's research developing novel methods and models for stress-related neurocardiac interactions. We are incredibly excited for Julian's forays into new directions for the lab!

See coverage by Croucher here: "Welcome, Croucher Class of 2026"

March 5, 2026

New publication! To celebrate 25 years of the Sakiyama-Elbert lab, where Nisha completed her PhD under the mentorship of Dr. Shelly Sakiyama-Elbert, we collaborated with other SSE lab alumni to write a perspective on the evolution of neural biomaterials and where we see the field developing moving forward. Check it out here!

January 2026

January 7, 2026

New publication! In collaboration with David Kaplan’s group (Tufts BME), we cultured hPSC-derived dorsal and ventral neurons in silk scaffolds to enable long-term 3D culture of spinal cord tissues with spatially distinct zones. Iyer lab contributions led by Emily. Check it out here!

January 5-6, 2026

New Lab Renovations and Move Completed! We are excited to announce that renovations to our new lab space are complete, and the lab officially relocated on January 26. Our new, bright lab home is located just above our old space in the Science and Technology Center (SciTech 282), which we now share with the Black and Martin labs.

To celebrate, we hosted a lab-warming gathering the day before the move to welcome our BME colleagues into the new space—the only time we’ll be eating or drinking in the lab!