2024 – Stamatis Papathanasiou

We are delighted to announce that Stamatis Papathanasiou has been selected as the recipient of the 2024 EACR-Mark Foundation-Pezcoller Foundation Rising Star Award. This prestigious award, launched in 2023, recognises an exceptional cancer researcher each year and aims to support groundbreaking projects that have the potential to make significant contributions to the field.

Stamatis Papathanasiou, Group Leader at the Institute of Molecular Biology (IMB), Mainz, Germany, was chosen for this award based on the high quality of his project proposal on ‘Mechanisms of cellular response to errors in mitosis: a new, non-genetic approach to an old question’.
An independent review panel consisting of representatives of the EACR, The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research and the Pezcoller Foundation, unanimously chose him as the winner.

His research focuses on deciphering how errors during cell division could cause heritable transcriptional dysregulation and epigenetic instability, which can in turn contribute to cell senescence, ageing and cancer.

Stamatis Papathanasiou commented “Receiving this award is a huge honor and great support for our work. I am truly thankful to the EACR, the Pezcoller Foundation and the Mark Foundation for recognizing our research ideas and motivating us to further tackle unknowns in basic mechanisms of tumorigenesis”.

WHO IS STAMATIS PAPATHANASIOU?

Stamatis studied Molecular Biology and Biotechnology in the Biology department of University of Crete in Greece. He then received his Master’s and PhD in Molecular Medicine from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in 2015.

He was awarded the “Fotis Kafatos Award of Excellence” for his PhD studies deciphering how cardiomyocyte cytoskeleton is dysregulated in heart failure. He then moved to Boston to continue his research in Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Cell Biology department of Harvard Medical School, where he focused on understanding basic mechanisms of tumorigenesis that are mediated by errors in mitosis and the generation of abnormal nuclear structures.