Tudorita Tumbar of Cornell University Has Received a Humboldt Research Award

Tudorita Tumbar, professor of molecular biology and genetics in the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, has received a Humboldt Research Award “for outstanding academics at the peak of their careers” to pursue a promising collaboration with researchers in Germany.

Dr. Tumbar leads a research group in the department of molecular biology and genetics working on the molecular mechanisms that control the fate of hair follicle stem cells. With the award, Professor Tumbar and her lab will continue a collaboration, begun in fall 2019, with the lab of Carien Niessen, a professor at Cologne University. Professor Tumbar’s research looks into stem cell regulation, tissue regeneration, and gene expression in mouse and human skin. It has implications in wound healing and tissue regeneration.

“Together,” Dr. Tumbar said, “we hope to address how the heterogeneous skin domains and stem cells we have identified might be affected by or contributing to mechanical forces and stresses in the skin.”

Professor Tumbar was born in Romania in 1970 and obtained her bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from the University of Bucharest in 1993. She then came to the United States for her Ph.D. work in cell biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She did postdoctoral research at the University of Chicago and Rockefeller University in New York. Professor Tumbar joined the Cornell faculty in 2004 and was promoted to full professor in 2017.