Dr Nitya Ramkumar

Biography
Nitya Ramkumar is a Principal Investigator at the A*STAR Skin Research Labs. She received her PhD from the Weill Cornell Graduate School and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where she worked with Kathryn Anderson to elucidate the role of Crumbs proteins during mouse gastrulation.
She subsequently pursued postdoctoral research with Buzz Baum at the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology, where she studied cytoskeletal regulation during mitotic exit. To extend these studies into an in vivo model system, she joined the laboratories of Stefano Di Talia and Kenneth Poss at Duke University. There, she was awarded an NIH Career Development Award to investigate epidermal morphogenesis and regeneration using zebrafish.

At A*STAR, Dr. Ramkumar’s research focuses on understanding how adult tissues rebuild and restore form after injury. Her lab uses the remarkable regenerative capacity of zebrafish to uncover fundamental principles governing skin regeneration and tissue morphogenesis. By integrating genetics, quantitative live imaging, developmental biology, and regeneration biology, her group aims to define how cellular behaviors and signaling networks coordinate tissue rebuilding in vivo.

Research Overview
Regeneration is a remarkable biological process that enables organisms to restore injured or lost tissues. Insights from highly regenerative animals may help uncover principles that could eventually inform strategies for tissue repair in humans.

Zebrafish possess an extraordinary ability to regenerate multiple tissues, including skin, fins, and scales. The adult epidermis is organized into basal, intermediate, and superficial layers, similar to mammalian skin and its regeneration is tightly coordinated with the regrowth of underlying skeletal structures. Importantly, zebrafish skin is highly accessible for imaging and experimental manipulation, and the system is genetically tractable, making it a powerful model for studying regeneration in vivo.

Using quantitative live imaging, transgenic zebrafish models, and chemical and genetic perturbations, my lab aims to generate a quantitative framework of epidermal cell behaviors during regeneration and determine how signaling pathways coordinate tissue rebuilding.

Many signalling pathways involved in regeneration are conserved between zebrafish and humans, making zebrafish a valuable system for uncovering mechanisms relevant to human biology and disease. Pathways activated during regeneration are often disrupted in skin disorders such as Epidermolysis Bullosa and Atopic Dermatitis. By understanding how these pathways function during successful regeneration and how they become disrupted in disease states, we aim to identify therapeutic targets that could guide therapies for skin disorders and tissue repair.

Selected Publications
Ramkumar N, Richardson C, O’Brien M, Butt FA, Park J, Chao AT, Bagnat M, Poss K, Di Talia S. Phased ERK-responsiveness and developmental robustness regulate teleost skin morphogenesis. PNAS. 2025 Mar 11

Haertter D, Wang X, Fogerson SM, Ramkumar N, Crawford JM, Poss KD, Di Talia S, Kiehart DP, Schmidt CF. DeepProjection: specific and robust projection of curved 2D tissue sheets from 3D microscopy using deep learning. Development. 2022 Nov 1

Ramkumar N, Patel JV, Anstatt J, Baum B. Aurora B-dependent polarization of the cortical actomyosin network during mitotic exit. EMBO Rep. 2021 Aug 24 

Hernández-Martínez R, Ramkumar N, Anderson KV. p120-catenin regulates WNT signaling and EMT in the mouse embryo. PNAS. 2019 Aug 20 

Ramkumar N, Omelchenko T, Silva-Gagliardi NF, McGlade CJ, Wijnholds J, Anderson KV. Crumbs2 promotes cell ingression during the epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition at gastrulation. Nat Cell Biol. 2016 Nov 21

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