• Epigenetic regulation of epithelial cell-fate commitment & differentiation
• The role of epigenetic regulators in human skin diseases and skin cancer
• Epidermal reprogramming & epidermal tissue regeneration

• Skin Biology
• Epigenetics
• Chromatin regulation

• Cohen, I., Birnbaum, R.Y., Leibson, K., Taube, R., Sivan, S. & Birk, O.S. (2012) ZNF750 is expressed in differentiated keratinocytes and regulates epidermal late differentiation genes. PLoS One 7, e42628.
• Cohen, I., Zhao, D., Bar, C., Valdes, V.J., Dauber-Decker, K.L., Nguyen, M.B., Nakayama, M., Rendl, M., Bickmore, W.A., Koseki, H., Zheng, D. & Ezhkova, E. (2018) PRC1 Fine-tunes Gene Repression and Activation to Safeguard Skin Development and Stem Cell Specification. Cell Stem Cell 22, 726-739 e7.
• Nguyen, M.B*., Cohen, I*., Kumar, V., Xu, Z., Bar, C., Dauber-Decker, K.L., Tsai, P.C., Marangoni, P., Klein, O.D., Hsu, Y.C., Chen, T., Mikkola, M.L. & Ezhkova, E. (2018) FGF signalling controls the specification of hair placode-derived SOX9 positive progenitors to Merkel cells. Nat Commun 9, 2333. *These authors contributed equally
• Cohen, I., Zhao, D., Menon, G., Nakayama, M., Koseki, H., Zheng, D. & Ezhkova, E. (2019) PRC1 preserves epidermal tissue integrity independently of PRC2. Genes Dev 33, 55-60
  

Ongoing Grants:
ICRF: 2020RCDA-0000000005;  2021-2023; “Polycomb repressive complex 1 and histone H2AK119 mono-ubiquitination in skin cancer”

• Prof. Eldad Silberstein, Department of Plastic Surgery, Soroka University Medical Center; “Epigenetic regulation in squamous cell carcinoma”
• Dr. Elena Ezhkova, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; “Role of Polycomb complexes in epidermal commitment, development, and disease”