Anna-Katerina Hadjantonakis

Anna-Katerina Hadjantonakis is the Alfred P. Sloan Chair of the Developmental Biology Program at the Sloan Kettering Institute and the Scientific Director of the Starr Foundation Program for Discovery Science.

Hadjantonakis and her lab study how cells form tissues. Her research focuses on how cells become specialized and how they collaborate at the population level to collectively build organs. The lab’s focus is on the endoderm, the progenitor tissue that gives rise to the respiratory and digestive tracts and associated organs such as the lung, liver and pancreas. The overarching goal of the research is to understand how endodermal organs form — in time and space — from populations of uncommitted progenitor cells in the embryo. 

Cancers in endodermal tissues and organs are some of the most aggressive, with the poorest prognosis. Because cancer arises when cells undergo an identity crisis, understanding how cells assemble into tissues with normal organization and function during embryonic development can provide important insights into the fundamental biological processes that become deregulated in cancer. 

Hadjantonakis received a Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics from Imperial College London.