Harini Iyer
Harini grew up in India, and she majored in Microbiology, which led her to her first foray into scientific research at the AstraZeneca Drug Discovery program. Although she joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with the intention of pursuing her Ph.D. in Microbiology, she heard her graduate advisor give a talk on planarians and fell in love with these flatworms with their astounding abilities of regeneration. Her graduate thesis defined the functions of multiple genes involved in germline stem cell self-renewal and maintenance in both planarians and their parasitic cousins, schistosomes. Her fascination with regeneration drew Harini to zebrafish, and she joined Will Talbot’s lab at Stanford, initially intending to study the process of remyelination. Fortuitously, however, her experiments led her to appreciate the fascinating biology of microglia and the importance of lysosomal pathways in these critical neuroimmune cells. As she designed her own research program, she delved into the field of neurodegenerative, neurodevelopmental, and neuropsychiatric disorders and the contributions of neuroimmune signaling pathways in these devastating conditions.
Outside of the lab, Harini loves to spend time with her dog, Arya, listen to way too many podcasts, and read fiction.