Ioanna Keklikoglou, Assistant Professor of the Department of Biology, University of Crete, joins IMBB as a collaborating faculty member

January 13. 2025

Professor Ioanna Keklikoglou, is now joining the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology as a collaborating faculty member. Since 2022 she is an Assistant Professor at the Biology Department of University of Crete.

Ioanna graduated from the Department of Biology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece) in 2008. She then moved to Germany to perform her PhD at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg, under the guidance of Prof Stefan Wiemann. In 2013, she joined Prof Michele De Palma's laboratory as a postdoctoral researcher at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Lausanne (Switzerland). During her postdoctoral training she identified extracellular matrix- and vesicle-mediated mechanisms of resistance to anti-angiogenic and cytotoxic therapies, respectively, through alterations in the accumulation and function of tumour-associated myeloid cells. After winning a Barts Charity Rising Stars Fellowship, she moved to London in 2019 to start her lab at Barts Cancer Institute, Queen Mary University of London (UK) within the Centre for Tumour Microenvironment (co-led by Prof Kairbaan Hodivala-Dilke and Prof Fran Balkwill). In late 2022, she repatriated to Greece, to join the Department of Biology at the University of Crete as an Assistant Professor (Heraklion, Greece), and holds an Honorary Lecturer position at Barts Cancer Institute (London, UK).  She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (UK). Her group focuses on understanding the molecular and cellular mechanisms that mediate resistance to anti-cancer therapies in cancer. Using state-of-the-art mouse models of cancer, as well as quantitative molecular and cellular approaches, they are interested in dissecting the microenvironmental cues that orchestrate specific tumour responses and metastasis formation.

Ioanna has received many prestigious awards for her research including the FEBS Excellence Award (2024), the Beug Foundation Metastasis Prize (2023), the L’Oreal-UNESCO Women in Science Award (2023) and the Academy of Medical Sciences Award (2022). Her research has been published in high profile journals such as Nature Cell Biology, Cell Reports, Oncogene and others. Her research is funded by several national and international sources, such as the Royal Society, Cancer Research UK, Barts Charity, the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation, the General Secretariat for Research, Innovation and Technology, the Academy of Medical Sciences, the Federation of European Biochemistry Societies (FEBS) and the Beug Foundation for metastasis research.