Rashmi Priya

Rashmi did her master's from India, where she worked on the replication mechanism of malaria parasites at JNU (New Delhi), and then moved to ACTREC (Mumbai) to work on cancer metastasis, supported by research fellowships from CRI-TMC, DBT and UGC, Govt. of India.

In 2011, she secured international PhD fellowships to join Alpha Yap’s lab at the University of Queensland, Australia, to study cell biology of epithelial cadherin junctions. Her PhD research led to the identification of novel Rho GTPase regulators at epithelial cadherin junctions and discovery of a bistable signalling network that sustains Rho signalling and epithelial homeostasis.

In 2016, she joined Didier Stainier’s lab at Max Planck HLR, Germany as a post-doctoral fellow, supported by fellowships from EMBO and the Humboldt foundation to study zebrafish heart development. There, she used her interdisciplinary background to provide novel insights into cardiac trabeculation – a less-understood morphogenetic event crucial for heart function. She was awarded a DFG start up grant to support her postdoctoral research.

In 2021, Rashmi joined the Francis Crick institute as a Crick/British Heart Foundation group leader. Her lab combines developmental genetics, quantitative cell biology and biophysical tools to address how organs acquire their robust architecture and function during embryonic development.