Elaine Fuchs is the Rebecca C. Lancefield Professor and a professor of mammalian cell biology and development at The Rockefeller University. Fuchs’s lab focuses on the stem cells that balance self-renewal with tissue regeneration in the skin. They investigate how stem cells make tissue and repair wounds and how this changes in inflammation and tumorigenesis. Her research employs high throughput transcriptomics and genomics, live imaging, cell biology, and functional approaches to unravel the complexities of tissue biology in health and disease. Her team investigates how skin stem cells establish unique chromatin landscapes and programs of gene expression and how this shifts in response to changes in their local environment. They seek to discover the molecular crosstalk between stem cells and their neighboring tissue cells (such as immune cells, fibroblasts, vasculature, and neurons) that instruct the stem cells to make epidermis or hair, or repair wounds, and how that molecular crosstalk changes upon inflammation, mechanical stress, aging, and cancer. Elaine Fuchs’ prizes and awards include: Presidential Young Investigator Award, National Medal of Science, L’Oréal-UNESCO Award. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Lab Website: https://www.rockefeller.edu/research/2374-fuchs-laboratory/