Mallica PANDYA
Research Fellow, Mechanobiology Institute, National University of Singapore
mallica.pandya@nus.edu.sg
Level 9 T-Lab
National University of Singapore
5A Engineering Drive 1
Singapore 117411
Mallica Pandya
Research Fellow
Principal Investigator
Research Interests
Tissue Engineering, Biomaterials, Cardiac Ageing
Qualifications
- PhD in Cell and Development Biology, London Centre for Nanotechnology, University College London
- MRes in Systems and Synthetic Biology, Imperial College London
- MSc in Molecular Biosciences, Heidelberg University Germany
- BSc in Life Science and Biochemistry, St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai
Biography
Mallica developed an interest in applied developmental biology during her undergraduate studies, becoming fascinated by how a single cell can give rise to entire organisms. She pursued this further at Heidelberg University, majoring in Developmental and Stem Cell Biology. Her master’s thesis at EMBL Barcelona supervised by Dr. Vikas Trivedi, explored self-organisation of fish embryonic cells. This led her to dive deeper into tissue biology, in understanding how tissues acquire their shapes and undergo shape-changes in response to mechanical forces. She studied this during her PhD at UCL under the guidance of Prof. Guillaume Charras, where she developed optogenetic tools to control force-generation in the cytoskeleton leading to cell and tissue deformations, recapitulating tissue-shape from development. In her current position as a Research Fellow at the MBI, she is working on developing biomaterials mimicking the extracellular environment of cells to understand how cells interpret these cues, especially in the context of aging.
Technical Skills
• Cell culture
• Microscopy
• Biomaterial engineering
• Genetics and molecular biology
Recent/ Selected Publications
-
Wodrascka, F., Ma, T., Gottheil, P., Durand, R., Anger, L., Schoenit, A., Pandya, M., Arnaud, M., Dang, T., Monfared, S. and Charras, G., 2026. Mechanical Tension Actively Triggers RhoA-Mediated Cell Extrusion. bioRxiv, pp.2026-07. (Submitted to Current Biology, July 2026)
-
Gritti, N., Lim, J.L., Anlaş, K., Pandya, M., Aalderink, G., Martínez-Ara, G. and Trivedi, V., 2021. MOrgAna: accessible quantitative analysis of organoids with machine learning. Development, 148(18), p.dev199611.
