Research/Areas of Interest
stem cells, neural tissue engineering, organoids, disease modeling, spinal cord injury, biomanufacturing
Education
- B.S., Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, United States, 2011
- M.S., Biomedical Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis, St Louis, United States, 2013
- PhD, Biomedical Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis, St Louis, United States, 2016
Biography
Dr. Nisha Iyer is the Tiampo Family Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Tufts University. 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 and PhD from Washington University in St. Louis in Biomedical Engineering. While conducting postdoctoral research at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin--Madison, she developed translatable methods to derive regionally and phenotypically specified hindbrain, spinal cord, and peripheral tissues from human pluripotent stem cells. Dr. Iyer's lab at Tufts focuses on how regional specificity impacts development, degeneration, and regeneration in the central nervous system and beyond, developing new stem cell tools and strategies to study neurodegenerative disease and develop cell therapies. She was awarded the prestigious NIH Director's HEAL Initiative New Innovator Award (2024) for advancing new models for chronic 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.