Welcome back to Tufts in Translation where we will spotlight faculty advancing new therapeutic approaches, targets, platforms, and delivery systems. Sessions will feature early-stage research across the drug discovery and design landscape, with an emphasis on translational potential and industry relevance.

Dr. Nisha Iyer is the Tiampo Family Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Tufts University with an appointment in the Neuroscience Program at Tufts University’s School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences. Her research interests are at the intersection of developmental biology and regenerative medicine, using stem cells to understand and advance neural repair.

She received her BS from Johns Hopkins University, PhD from Washington University in St. Louis in Biomedical Engineering, and conducted postdoctoral research at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin--Madison. As an NIH-NINDS F31 Predoctoral Fellow and F32 Postdoctoral Fellow, her research focused on applying CRISPR-based gene editing and stem cell differentiation strategies to generate regionally and phenotypically specified spinal cell types for in vitro modeling and transplantation after spinal cord injury. Her lab now focuses on how regional specificity impacts development, degeneration, and regeneration in the spinal cord and peripheral nervous system, developing human pluripotent stem cell-based biomanufacturing strategies and organoid technologies to direct drug discovery and cell therapy research.

She is a recipient of the NIH HEAL Initiative New Innovator Award (DP2), supporting her efforts developing novel hPSC models for pain. Dr. Iyer is also a passionate educator who seeks to lower barriers to higher education in STEM and to engage the broader community in conversations about science and society.