Keywords: cancer, immunology, immunotherapy, tumor microenvironment, myeloid infiltrate, immune suppression, CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing, mouse research, human research

Evangelia Bolli, PhD (she, her, hers)

Postdoctoral Fellow at AGORA Cancer Research Center, University of Geneva

Evangelia is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in prof. Mikael Pittet’s lab at the AGORA Cancer Research Center and the University of Geneva. Her research aims to understand why and how the immune system fails to fight cancer. Her areas of expertise are immunology and immunotherapy. In the Pittet lab, Evangelia studies neutrophils using cutting-edge technologies (e.g. next-generation CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing, scRNA sequencing) to reveal their complexity and mechanisms of function in mouse and human cancers.

Prior to being in Switzerland, Eva completed her BSc in Biology at the University of Crete in Greece and her MSc in Biomolecular Sciences at the Free University of Brussels (Brussels, Belgium).  She received her PhD in Bioengineering from the Free University of Brussels (Belgium). During her PhD studies in the lab of prof. Jo van Ginderachter, Evangelia investigated the role of macrophages during tumor progression and developed drug conjugates to target these cells for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes in preclinical models.  After graduating in 2019, Evangelia joined prof. Mikael Pittet’s lab at the Center for Systems Biology of Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital (Boston, MA), where she began her postdoctoral research. After the move of the Pittet lab to the AGORA Cancer Research Center in Switzerland, Evangelia continues her research at the new location.

Evangelia received the Strategic Basic Research Doctoral Fellowship Innovatie door Wetenschap en Technologie (IWT) from 2015-2019 and the Henri Benedictus Postdoctoral Fellowship of the Belgian American Educational Foundation from 2019-2020. She was also recently awarded the Marie Skłodowska-Curie European Reintegration Fellowship funded by the European Commission.

Outside of her research, Eva strives to combat gender bias in the workplace through mentorship and was part of the Women in Science project in Belgium, which promoted diversity and gender balance. Eva envisions a scientific community where ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and religion are not subjects to bias.