Leah Vardy

Leah Vardy is a Senior Principal Investigator at the Skin Research Institute of Singapore in A*STAR and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Nanyang Technological University. Leah received her Ph.D at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London and did post-doctoral work at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge at the MIT in the US. In 2007, she was appointed to A*STAR’s Institute of Medical Biology before joining SRIS in 2018. Leah has worked in a diverse array of systems including yeast, fruit flies, embryonic stem cells and epidermal cells. Her current research focuses on understanding how cellular behavior within the epidermis is controlled. Projects in the lab address this in the context of pigmentation, tissue repair and skin aging.

Research interests

Vardy lab is interested in understanding how gene expression changes contribute to different skin pathologies. We use a combination of human ex-vivo tissue along with 2D and 3D skin culture models to study how gene expression changes drive cellular behaviors. Research in the Vardy lab focuses on a group of metabolites called polyamines. The polyamines putrescine, spermidine, and spermine drive gene expression changes in part, through control of RNA. Additional projects in the lab look at the role of post-transcriptional control in the regulation of skin homeostasis. Projects in the lab focus on wound healing, epidermal pigmentation and skin barrier function.