Our Research

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.

We are hiring!

We are actively searching to fill multiple roles in the lab. If you are interested in joining our team, check out our open positions!

News & Upcoming Events

March 2023

March 29, 2023

We are growing more! The lab is excited to welcome research technician Zhixin Liao and PhD student Emily Pallack later this summer. Emily was awarded the prestigious NSF-GRFP fellowship for her proposal entitled "Understanding the role of regionally specific neurons and mechanically specific extracellular matrix in the spinal cord." Congrats to Emily!

December 2022

December 2, 2022

We are growing! The lab welcomes undergraduates Jed Quiaoit, Dylan Patel, & Farsin Syed. They will join me and masters student Brandon Hernandez-Pacheco in the spring to get cell culture up and running! Undergraduate Michelle Sun has been instrumental in getting the lab unpacked and set up, and we will miss her as she spends the next semester abroad in Sweden. (Dylan, Nisha, Michelle, & Jed pictured below)

November 2022

November 15, 2022

Nisha participated as a panelist in the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine Forum on Regenerative Medicine's workshop, Training the Regenerative Medicine Workforce for the Future. Hear more about issues related to workforce development, education, and diversity here!

October 2022

October 12-15, 2022

Nisha had a great time meeting old and new friends, recruiting potential lab members, spending time with past and present Tufts trainees, and presenting our research ("Elucidating human spinal cord diversity with stem cells & single-cell RNA sequencing") at the BMES 2022 Annual meeting in San Antonio, TX! Excited to have received the Burroughs Young Investigator Award from BMES to help attend the meeting!

September 2022

September 30, 2022

New paper published! "Modular derivation of diverse, regionally discrete human posterior CNS neurons enables discovery of transcriptomic patterns" is now published in Science Advances! This was a great interdisciplinary collaboration between stem cell engineers and bioinformaticians, working together to develop and characterize diverse populations of neurons spanning the hindbrain through lumbar spinal cord. Congrats to all of the authors in the Iyer, Ashton, and Roy labs!

September 16, 2022

Welcome to the first Iyer Lab member, undergrad Michelle Sun! Michelle will be working to help get the lab cleaned, organized, and ready for research to start.

August 2022

August 26, 2022

First paper out of the Iyer lab! Our mini review, "Bioengineering the Human Spinal Cord" is now published in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology! We provide a brief primer on spinal cord developmental biology, 2D and 3D methods for differentiating spinal cells and tissues from human pluripotent stem cells, and bioengineering strategies to direct spinal organoid patterning and morphogenesis.

August 1, 2022

The Iyer Stem Cell and Regeneration Lab has opened at Tufts University in the Department of Biomedical Engineering! We are excited to get science started soon!

Nisha was selected as a recipient of the Young Investigator Award for the 2022 BMES Annual Meeting. This prestigious award recognizes talented early career Postdoctoral Fellows or Early-Stage Faculty who have successfully submitted one of the highest-ranking general abstracts for the 2022 meeting. She will be speaking at the meeting in October.