Tudorita Tumbar was born in Romania in 1970 and obtained her Bachelor degree in Biochemistry from University of Bucharest in 1993. She then came to the United States for her PhD work in Cell Biology at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her post-doctoral training with Elaine Fuchs began at University of Chicago and continued at Rockefeller University. She is now leading her own research group in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Cornell University working on molecular mechanisms controlling cell fate of hair follicle stem cells.