Lavaniya Thanabalasundaram

Research Student

Lavaniya completed her undergraduate degree in Human Sciences and Anatomy at King’s College London in 2011. Her undergraduate project supervised by Professor Britta Eickholt focused on the genetic pathways involved in Autism. Her interest in neural development led to an MSc in Developmental Biology. The project was supervised by Dr Vasanta Subramanian entitled “The role of cdx1 in the adult intestinal stem cell population” and gave her an insight into molecular biology.

Lavaniya volunteered at the MRC Centre for Developmental Neurobiology at King’s College London as a research assistant. In 2013 Lavaniya started her role as a Scientist at ReNeuron in Research and Development and in 2015, she started a part-time PhD studentship funded by ReNeuron. The title of the PhD project is ‘Stem cell characterization for neural cell therapy ’ and the project will focus on investigating the behaviour of cells in biomaterials and their application in nervous system repair.