Shruti Naik is an Indian American scientist who is known for her interdisciplinary research in immunology and adult stem cell biology. She is an Associate Professor of Pathology, Dermatology, and Medicine and Associate Director for the Colton Center for Autoimmunity at NYU Langone Health. Her lab combines approaches from the fields of immunology, microbiology, stem cell biology, and cancer biology with cutting-edge imaging and sequencing technologies to discover new ways of treating inflammatory diseases.

Naik’s discoveries have received international acclaim. Her accolades include the Regeneron Prize for Creative Innovation, L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Award, the 2018 regional Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists, and the International Takeda Innovator in Regeneration Award. Naik was named a Packard Fellow for her research into the molecular mechanisms that underpin the function of tissue stem cells.^[1] She has also received the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award and been named a Pew-Stewart Scholar and a New York Stem Cell Foundation Robertson Investigator.

Naik was born in India and moved to America at the age of twelve.^[2] Naik dealt with the culture shock through humor and aspired to be a stand-up comedian.^[2] Whilst a high school student, Naik came across the story of Dr. Bonnie Bassler, a biologist at Princeton University, who was working on quorum sensing mechanisms that make bacteria glow.^[2] After watching Bassler on television, Naik decided she wanted to become a biologist and took classes in microbiology in high school.^[2]

Naik was an undergraduate student at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she majored in cell and molecular biology.^[3] As an undergraduate, Naik worked in the Food and Drug Administration laboratory on identifying microbes responsible for food-related outbreaks.^[2] After graduating, Naik was appointed to the Naval Medical Research Center, where she looked at immune responses to traumatic brain injury.^[2]

Naik earned her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania under the supervision of Dr. Yasmine Belkaid and Julie Segre.^[4] She was a Damon Runyon Cancer Research postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Elaine Fuchs at Rockefeller University.^[5]

Naik studies how the immune system maintains the health of our tissues and organs over our lifetime. In particular, Naik is interested in the organs that interface with the external environment, including the skin, lungs, and gut.^[6] She has investigated inflammation and tissue regeneration, host-microbe interactions, and inflammatory diseases.^[6] Some notable discoveries include identifying that commensal or friendly microbes are necessary for proper developmental and function of the skin immune system, discovering that skin stem cells can sense and remember inflammation, and defining new immunological factors that control cellular adaptation to hypoxia in wound repair. Her lab makes fundamental discoveries that can be leveraged to treat inflammatory diseases such as psoriasis and inflammatory bowel disease, non-healing wounds, and infectious diseases.

Naik has received grant funding from many highly esteemed organizations, including National Institutes of Health, Pew Charitable Trusts, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Kenneth Rainin Foundation, New York Stem Cell Foundation, and the National Psoriasis Foundation. She is currently on the Scientific Advisory Board of Seed and Keystone Symposia.^[7]

Our microbial brethren  

Naik’s pioneering work as a graduate student opened a new field on the interactions between skin commensals and resident immune cells, underscoring the importance of this dialogue in cutaneous immunity.^[8] She found that indigenous microbes co-opt tissue-specific modes of interacting with the host to direct immune cell function in the skin. Continuing this line of inquiry, she uncovered that certain commensal species are able to elicit a unique subset of IL-17A-producing CD8 T cells (Tc17s), suggesting that sustaining complex communities of commensals is necessary to maintain a diverse repertoire of immune function. She then mapped the dendritic cell subsets necessary to sense commensals and induce long-term Tc17s.^[9] Importantly, this dialogue takes place in the absence of overt inflammation in healthy skin. Thus, her work revealed a new type of “homeostatic” immune response that is continuously calibrating barrier immunity to commensal signals.

How cells remember inflammation

Naik's research on skin stem cells was the first to identify how the skin remembers injuries and exposure to irritants, showing that the long-lived epithelial stem cells in the skin encode a memory of inflammatory stimuli. Repeated exposure can change the genetic landscape of stem cells, making them quicker to respond when they next encounter an attack. This response can be beneficial, such as allowing for faster healing of wounds, or they can be damaging, such as allowing for inflammatory skin diseases such as psoriasis.^[10] Naik continues this work to understand how all the different cell types in a complex tissue may experience and remember inflammation and if such memories can be manipulated to promote health.

Immunity in wound repair and inflammatory disease

Recent advances in our understanding of immunity from the Naik lab include how the immune system enables cells to adapt to hypoxia,^[11] immune-tissue crosstalk in regeneration and repair processes,^[12] spatial transcriptomics stratification of psoriasis severity,^[13] and emerging innovation in regenerative medicine.^[14] Notably, Naik’s findings on hypoxia upended the long-held view that hypoxia is sufficient to cell-autonomously induce HIF1α-mediated adaptation. They instead found a secondary signal from repair-associated immune cells was essential to activate HIF1α in the presence of hypoxia. These findings have profound implications for cellular adaptation in a range of damage-associated diseases, including non-healing wounds, cancers, and inflammatory conditions. Naik’s work to understand how inflammatory factors fuel tissue repair is critical to understand disease states that are driven by immune-mediated tissue damage. This work can lead to regenerative therapies for inflammatory and infectious disease that promote multisystem tissue repair.

Naik has spoken on not only her goals as a scientist (“discovery and bettering human health”), but also as a person to make science more accessible to the world.^[15] Naik has demonstrated a consistent commitment to scientific outreach, mentorship, and advocacy for women and other underrepresented groups in STEM. She has appeared on NBC,^[15] NPR’s Inflection Point,^[16] Forbes Magazine,^[17][18] and WIRED.^[19] She has also been a panelist at several career-related seminars focusing on reducing institutional barriers^{[20][21][22][23][24]} and mentors individuals at various stages of their career, including high school student visitors, undergraduate trainees, doctoral candidates, postdoctoral fellows, professional researchers, and faculty.

Naik spoke to NBC on her path as a woman of color in science: ““Being a woman of color in science comes with its own challenges, and so I often find myself in rooms where there are very few people who look like me. And for a very long time this was very hard because I always looked around the room and said ‘Am I out of place speaking up or asking a question or voicing my opinion?’ I overcame that by speaking up, by being the first person in a room to ask a question… Supporting women, supporting underrepresented minorities… it’s important to have diverse views because discovery at a very fundamental level demands diversity.”^[15]

Naik is also an Executive Producer of “Six Degrees From Science”,^[25] a feature-length documentary currently in production that follows passionate biomedical scientists working in competitive and resource-finite environments. It explores the topics of institutional barriers and the impact of these challenges on what is at stake in science.  

• 2011 NIH, Fellows Award for Research Excellence
• 2012 NIH, Women Scientists Advisor Scholar Award
• 2012 NIH, Fellows Award for Research Excellence
• 2013 NIH Cytokine Interest Group, Best Paper of 2012 Award
• 2015 Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Regeneron Prize for Creative Innovation^[26]
• 2016 L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Award^[27]
• 2017 Sartorius Prize winners^[3]
• 2018 Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists^[10]
• 2018 Nature Research Awards Finalist^[28]
• 2018 Damon Runyon Dale F. Frey Award for Breakthrough Scientists^[29]
• 2018 Tri-Institution Breakout Award^[30]
• 2019 Takeda Awards Innovators in Science Award Early Career Winner^[31]
• 2019 Skin Cancer Foundation, Dr. Marcia Robbins-Wilf Research Award^[32]
• 2020 Packard Fellow^[1]
• 2020 Pew Stewart Fellow^[33]
• 2020 NIH DP2 Innovator Award NIH DP2 Award^[34]
• 2021 Kenneth Rainin Foundation New Innovator Award^[35]
• 2021 International Cytokine and Interferon Society Regeneron New Investigator Award^[36]
• 2021 New York Stem Cell Foundation Robertson Stem Cell Investigator^[37]
• 2023 Irma Hirschl-Weill-Caulier Career Scientist Award
• 2023 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory WiSE McClintock Award^[38]
• 2023 Burroughs Welcome Trust PATH Forward Award^[39]