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

Associate Professor
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. 

Meritxell 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 functionally 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.

Eddie C.H. Ma, PhD

City University of Hong Kong
Hong Kong

Prof. Ma has made significant contributions to neuroscience and regenerative medicine, particularly in elucidating the molecular mechanisms underlying axon regeneration, as well as in the study of glaucoma, aging, Alzheimer’s disease, and diabetic neuropathy. His lab employs a multidisciplinary approach that includes drug repurposing, bioinformatics, metabolomics analysis, deep brain stimulation, cell biology, molecular biology, and animal behavior, all aimed at finding treatment strategies that facilitate functional recovery (i.e., sensory, motor, visual, and memory).

Aiko Sada, PhD

Professor, Division of Skin Regeneration and Aging
Medical Institute of Bioregulation, Kyushu University
Fukuoka, 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 signalling 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

Professor Nadia Rosenthal, FMedSci FAAHMS

Scientific Director and Professor, The Jackson Laboratory for Mammalian Genetics, the Maxine Groffsky Endowed Chair

Professor Rosenthal is the Scientific Director of The Jackson Laboratory (Bar Harbor, Maine). She obtained her Ph.D. from Harvard Medical School, where she later directed a biomedical research laboratory, then established and headed the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) campus in Rome. She was Founding Director of the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute at Monash University and founded EMBL Australia as its Scientific Head. Rosenthal is an EMBO member, Fellow of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences and the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Science, is an NH&MRC Australia Fellow, and is the Maxine Groffsky Endowed Chair at The Jackson Laboratory. She has received numerous honorary doctorates and prizes, participates on international advisory boards and committees and is a Founding Editor of Disease Models and Mechanisms, Deputy Editor of Differentiation and Founding Editor-in-Chief of NPJ Regenerative Medicine.

Professor Peter Currie, FAA IntFRSE

Director, Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute
Monash University
Melbourne, Australia

Professor Peter Currie received his PhD in Drosophila genetics from Syracuse University, New York, USA.  He undertook postdoctoral training in zebrafish development at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (now Cancer Research UK) in London, UK.  He has worked as a 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 led research in skeletal muscle development and regeneration. In 2016 Professor Currie was appointed Director of Research of the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute (ARMI) at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He is an Associate Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and currently is a Senior Principal Research Fellow with the National Health and Medical Research Council. To translate and commercialise his research, Professor Currie co-founded Myostellar, a startup that is developing a new class of therapies designed to stimulate skeletal muscle regeneration. The company aims to address an urgent unmet need for people living with conditions such as muscular dystrophies. Professor Currie was elected an International Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (IntFRSE) in 2019 and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science (FAA) in 2020. He is ARMI’s Director and a Group Leader, as well as a member of the ARMI Leadership Advisory Board.

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 and Master 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.

View the full NPJ Regen Med Editorial Board here.