About the Editors

Editors-in-Chief

Karen L. ChristmanKaren L. Christman, PhD

Professor of Bioengineering, Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs & Welfare, Jacobs School of Engineering
UC San Diego
CA, USA


Professor Christman’s lab is housed in the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine and focuses on developing novel biomaterials for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine applications. She has a strong translational focus with the main goal of developing minimally invasive therapies for cardiovascular disease and women’s health. Her work led to the first clinical trial with a pro-regenerative biomaterial for treating myocardial infarction and she is currently pursuing clinical translation with other biomaterial technologies.

Purushothama Rao TataPurushothama Rao Tata, PhD

Assistant Professor, Department of Cell Biology and Medicine; Co-Director, Duke Regeneration Center
Duke University Medical Center
NC, USA


Dr. Tata's research interests focus on understanding the cellular ensembles in the context of tissue homeostasis, regeneration and tumorigenesis in diverse epithelial tissues including lung. They utilize genetic, live imaging, 3-dimensional organoid cultures, and next generation sequencing technologies to study the behavior of tissues at single cell level. They are developing novel technologies to profile and identify cell types in normal and pathological tissues based on their transcriptome and epigenome signatures and to establish an integrated molecular platform that can serve as reference molecular atlas for future studies.

Executive Editor

Wanda Layman, PhD






Wanda obtained an MS in Genetics and Bioinformatics from the University of Nebraska, studying the genetic basis underlying innate susceptibility and resistance to bacterial infection. Her doctoral work in Human Genetics at the University of Michigan focused on the role of chromatin remodeling in neural development and maintenance in mammals. She later investigated the role of epigenetic regulation in mammalian cell fate decisions and cellular regeneration at St Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Wanda joined the npj series as a Managing Editor in June 2017, and was promoted to Executive Editor of the npj series Life and Health Sciences in October 2021. She is located in New York.

Associate Editors

Helen Blau, PhD

Baxter Laboratory for Stem Cell Biology
Stanford University School of Medicine
CA, USA


Helen M. Blau, Ph.D. is the Donald E. and Delia B. Baxter Foundation professor and Director of the Baxter Laboratory for Stem Cell Biology at Stanford University. Blau's research area is regenerative medicine with a focus on stem cells. She is renowned for her work on nuclear reprogramming and demonstration of the plasticity of cell fate using cell fusion. Her lab has forged novel approaches to treating muscle damaged due to disease, injury, or aging. She pioneered the design of biomaterials to mimic the in vivo microenvironment (niche) and direct stem cell fate. Her laboratory discovered a novel hallmark of muscle aging, the prostaglandin degrading enzyme, 15-PGDH, whose inhibition augments muscle stem cell function and aged muscle mass and strength.

Lesley W. Chow, PhD

Asst. Prof., Materials Science and Engineering, Bioengineering
Lehigh University
PA, USA
 

Lesley Chow leads the Modular Biomaterials Laboratory, which broadly focuses on biomaterials design, synthesis, and fabrication for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. Her lab is particularly interested in engineering multicomponent biomaterials that direct native-like tissue formation and organization. To achieve this, they developed a class of biofunctionalized polymer-based building blocks that can be combined using scaffold fabrication techniques like 3D printing. Her lab is currently using this modular strategy to fabricate biodegradable scaffolds to drive functional musculoskeletal and corneal tissue regeneration. 

Dr Jianping FuJianping Fu, PhD

Professor, Mechanical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Cell and Developmental Biology
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
MI, USA


Dr. Fu's research interests lie at the nexus of bioengineering, biophysics, and biology. Specifically, his research group integrates micro/nanoengineering, single-cell technologies, and systems and synthetic biology methods with new discoveries of mechanobiology, epigenetics, and stem cell biology for advancing understanding of human development. In his research, he has made significant contributions to these research areas: stem cell bioengineering, developmental bioengineering, cell mechanics, mechanotransduction, micro/nanofluidics, and BioMEMS.

Meritxell HuchMeritxell Huch, PhD

Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics
Dresden, Germany

 

Dr Meritxell Huch is a Lise Meitner Max Planck Research Group Leader at the MPI-CBG, in Dresden. Her research focuses on the understanding of tissue regeneration. Her lab established the first human liver cancer organoid model, described that hepatoblasts are a funtionally heterogenous and showed that that epigenetic remodelling, in the form of DNA (hydroxy)methylation changes, is crucial to induce cellular plasticity during regeneration. For these achievements, she has received several awards including the Women in Cell Science Prize from the British society, the EMBO young investigator award or the BINDER prize.

Christopher M Jewell, PhD

University of Maryland - College Park; United States Department of Veterans Affairs
Washington DC, USA



Christopher M. Jewell is the MPower Professor and the Minta Martin Professor of Engineering at the University of Maryland in the Fischell Department of Bioengineering, as well as a Research Biologist with the United States Department of Veterans Affairs. His work has been supported by over $22M in funding, resulting in over 120 manuscripts and patents, including papers in ACS Nano, Cell Reports, Nature, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Materials, PNAS, Trends in Immunology, and others. He is also a Fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES), the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), and the Alliance for Cancer Gene Therapy (ACGT). Some of Dr. Jewell’s awards include being honored by the White House as a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), selection as a Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovator, appointment as an Associate Scientific Advisor for Science Translational Medicine, receipt of the Outstanding Lectureship in Drug Delivery from the Materials Research Society, and selection as the University of Maryland’s Graduate Faculty Mentor of the Year. Dr. Jewell received his PhD in 2008 from the University of Wisconsin – Madison working with Professor David Lynn, before joining the Boston Consulting Group in New York City, where he worked in R&D strategy with global pharmaceutical companies. Dr. Jewell carried out his postdoctoral training in immune engineering as a Ragon Institute Fellow working with Dr. Darrell Irvine at MIT and as a Visiting Scientist at Harvard with Dr. Dan Barouch in the division of Vaccine Research.

Eddie C.H. Ma, PhD

City University of Hong Kong
Hong Kong

 

Dr Ma’s lab focuses on understanding the intrinsic molecular machinery necessary for central and peripheral nervous system regeneration after injury using a multidisciplinary approach spanning cell biology, molecular biology, electrophysiology, animal behavior and genetics. He also has a keen interest in understanding the neuropathology and the roles of glial cells in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s Disease and Parkinson’s Disease. Their ultimate goal is to develop new strategy to promote axon regeneration after nerve injury, and to improve our understanding and treatment for neurodegenerative diseases.

Alberto Rosello DiezAlberto Rosello Diez, PhD

Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute (Monash University)
Clayton, VIC, Australia

 

Dr. Alberto Rosello-Diez received his PhD in Spain, studying pattern formation in the vertebrate limb. As a postdoc at the Sloan Kettering Institute in New York, Alberto conceived and developed mouse genetic models of unilateral perturbations of limb growth, to study the repair of developmental defects. In June 2018, Alberto joined the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute (Monash University) as a Group Leader. His laboratory studies the organ-repair responses activated by developmental perturbations, with a focus on the long bones of the limbs. In the long term, the goal of the lab is to learn how to re-activate or boost the cells and responses uncovered by these studies, including rare stem cell populations.

Dr Aiko Sada

International Research Center for Medical Sciences (IRCMS), Kumamoto University
Kumamoto, Japan

Her research focuses on the cellular and molecular mechanisms of skin regeneration and aging. Her lab primarily uses mouse genetics and three-dimensional skin culture systems to elucidate the regulatory mechanisms of epidermal stem cells in physiological or pathological conditions. She has made significant contributions to elucidating the regulatory mechanisms of tissue stem cells, focusing on diverse biomolecules such as post-transcriptional gene regulations, epigenome, and extracellular environments.

Farah Sheikh, PhD

University of California San Diego
La Jolla, CA, USA

 

Dr. Farah Sheikh’s lab is located at the University of California San Diego and is focused on uncovering mechanisms underlying biomechanical stress responses in the heart, which play a central role in the pathology of human heart disease. Her lab has generated novel genetic mouse and human stem cell models to uncover the role of signaling effectors as well as cytoskeletal and cell-cell junction components in the pathogenesis of genetic based cardiomyopathies (dilated, hypertrophic and arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy) and heart failure progression. She has a strong translational arm to her research and is developing and advancing gene-therapy based treatment approaches for genetic based cardiomyopathy populations.

Founding Editors and Scientific Advisors

Nadia Rosenthal, PhD, FMedSci, FAAHMS

Scientific Director, The Jackson Laboratory, USA
Chair, Cardiovascular Science & Scientific Director, Imperial College London
Scientific Head, EMBL, Australia, Australia


Professor Rosenthal is a member of the Australia and New Zealand Society for Cell and Developmental Biology. She has been a faculty member of the Australian Developmental Biology Workshop and is a Visiting Professor at University of Western Australia. She currently holds an NHMRC Australia Fellowship. Professor Rosenthal spearheaded the election of Australia to EMBL as its first Associate Member and serves as Scientific Head of EMBL Australia. She also holds a Chair in Cardiovascular Science at Imperial College London. Professor Rosenthal's research focuses on the developmental genetics of heart and skeletal muscle, the molecular biology of ageing and the role of growth factors, stem cells and the immune system in tissue regeneration.

Peter Currie, PhD

Director, Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute
Monash University
Melbourne, Australia


Professor Currie has worked as an independent laboratory head at the UK Medical Research Council Human Genetics Unit in Edinburgh, UK and the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute in Sydney, Australia, where he headed a research programme focused on skeletal muscle development and regeneration. In 2016 he was appointed Director of the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. His work is centred on understanding how the small freshwater zebrafish is able to build and regenerate both skeletal and cardiac muscle.

Advisory Editors

Aline Luckgen

Aline is an associate editor at Nature Communications, where she handles bioengineering manuscripts with a particular focus on biomaterials and biomedical devices. After obtaining her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in bioengineering at Rice University and the EPFL, respectively, she completed her PhD at the Technical University in Berlin. In her doctoral work, she investigated the degradation behavior of alginate-based hydrogels for bone regeneration.

Evan Bardot

Evan joined Nature Communications in 2021. He received his PhD from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. His doctoral work focused on cell fate decisions during early mammalian heart development. He performed postdoctoral research at the Sloan Kettering Institute, studying foregut endoderm patterning and organogenesis during mouse development. Evan is based in the New York office and handles papers in the areas of developmental biology, EvoDevo, and stem cell models of development.

Editorial Board Members

Stephen Badylak, DVM, PhD, MD The University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
Nick Barker, PhD A*Star, Singapore
​Shoumo Bhattacharya, MD University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Cedric Blanpain, MD, PhD Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium
Andrew Brack, PhD University of California, San Francisco, California, USA
Nenad Bursac, PhD Duke University, North Carolina, USA
Stuart Forbes, FRSE, FMedSci University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
Gerald de Haan, PhD University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands
​Magdalena Götz, PhD Helmholz Center Munich, Munich, Germany
​Richard Harvey, PhD The Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, Sydney, Australia
Karen Hirschi, PhD Yale Cardiovascular Research Center, Conneticut, USA
Salman Khetani, PhD University of Illinois at Chicago, Illinois, USA
Michael Lotze, MD University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
Paul Martin, BSc, PhD University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
Alexandra Naba, PhD University of Illinois at Chicago, Illinois, USA
Andras Nagy, PhD Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto, Canada
Laura Niklason, PhD, MD Yale University, Conneticut, USA
Martin Pera, PhD The Jackson Laboratory, Maine, USA
Enzo Porrello, PhD Murdoch Children's Research Institute, Melbourne, Australia
Ken Poss, PhD Duke University, North Carolina, USA
Olivier Pourquie, PhD Harvard University, Massachusetts, USA
​Fred Relaix, PhD Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, Paris, France
Thomas Rando, MD, PhD Stanford University School of Medicine, California, USA
Michael Rudnicki, OC, PhD, FRSC Ottawa Health Research Institute, Ottawa, Canada
Susanne Sattler, PhD Imperial College London, London, UK
Michael Schneider, MD Imperial College London, London, UK
Michal Schwartz, PhD Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel
​Samuel Stupp, PhD Northwestern University, Illinois, USA
Shahragim Tajbakhsh, PhD Pasteur Institute, Paris, France
Jessica LaMae Whited, PhD, Harvard University, Massachusetts, USA
Qi Zhou, PhD Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

 

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