Janet Rowley Award to Nina Cabezas-Wallscheid
International Society for Experimental Hematology honours Max Planck Researcher
Nina Cabezas-Wallscheid, research group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics, receives the 2023 Janet Rowley Award from the International Society for Experimental Hematology (ISEH).
The award, named after Professor Janet Rowley, a geneticist and the first scientist to identify a chromosomal translocation as the cause of leukemia and other cancers, recognizes early career scientists who have made outstanding scientific contributions to the field.
Nina Cabezas-Wallscheid “made several seminal discoveries on the biology of quiescence and dormancy of hematopoietic stem cells (HSC), cementing a reputation as a world-class scientist able to combine several experimental approaches targeting proteome, transcriptome, and methylome,” says the ISEH award committee. Early on in her career, she revealed the crucial role of retinoic acid in maintaining HSC in a dormant state. When she started her research group at MPI-IE in Freiburg, she developed her original line of research on HSC dormancy, pursuing projects that mix mouse genetics, human samples, and state-of-the-art metabolomics and bioinformatics.
Congratulations Nina!
About Nina Caebzas-Wallscheid
Nina Cabezas-Wallscheid studied biotechnology (MSc) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain, and the University of Parma, Italy. She earned a Ph.D. in the study of AML1-ETO, a subtype of acute myeloid leukemia (AML), at the University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany, under the supervision of Ernesto Bockamp. There, Nina Cabezas-Wallscheid showed the evolution of transcriptional landscapes and the establishment of cancer stem cell hierarchies based on a novel mouse model. During her Ph.D., she also visited the laboratory of David Scadden as a guest scientist at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute in Boston, USA.
Nina Cabezas-Wallscheid performed her postdoctoral fellowship in the Division of Stem Cells and Cancer under the mentorship of Andreas Trumpp at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg, Germany. There, she focused her research on identifying regulatory networks in the adult HSC and multipotent compartment and investigating factors controlling HSC dormancy. In 2017, Nina Cabezas-Wallscheid was appointed group leader at Freiburg’s Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics. Nina Cabezas-Wallscheid is an emerging researcher supported by the European Research Council (ERC) through a prestigious ERC Starting Grant, which she received in 2017. One year later, she was honored with the GSCN 2018 Young Investigator Award from the German Stem Cell Network (GSCN). In addition, Nina Cabezas-Wallscheid actively participates in several research consortia, such as the Cluster of Excellence at the University of Freiburg CIBSS, various Collaborative Research Conosortias funded by the DFG (CRC992, CRC1425, CRC1479), and ARCH (H2020-MSCA-ITN).
International Society for Experimental Hematology (ISEH)
The International Society for Experimental Hematology (ISEH) was established in 1950 by a group of scientists who sought to create a forum for the presentation and discussion of pre-clinical data in experimental hematology. ISEH continues to be dedicated to the promotion of scientific knowledge and clinical application of basic hematologic and immunologic disorders through research, publications, and scientific programs.
