Assoc. Prof. Eva Szegezdi

Head of the Blood Cancer Biobank in Ireland, University of Galway

Research interests: Cancer Therapeutics, Chronic Lymphocytic Leukaemia, Cancer Research, Biobanking

Lecturer in Biochemistry, University of Galway, Head of the Blood Cancer Biobank in Ireland, Principal investigator of the Cancer Niche Laboratory.

Dr. Szegezdi received her PhD in medical science in 2000 studying cell death signalling at the University of Debrecen, Hungary. She then joined the Cell Stress and Apoptosis Research laboratory led by Prof. Afshin Samali at the National University of Ireland, Galway in 2001 to study stress-induced cell death in heart and pancreatic cells. In 2010 she established her own research group as a Science Foundation Ireland Starting Investigator (SIRG) and an Irish Cancer Society Research Fellow focusing on how the tissues surrounding cancer cells protect the tumour from chemotherapeutics. She took up a university lecturer position in the Discipline of Biochemistry, National University of Ireland, Galway in 2011 where she is now a lecturer, the director of the Masters degree programme on cancer research and head of the Cancer Niche Research Laboratory and a principal investigator in the recently established Blood Cancer Network Ireland funded by SFI and the Irish Cancer Society.

Research and Clinical Interests: Current projects in her laboratory focus on the molecular wiring of cancer cells to predict how tumour cells respond to chemotherapeutics. A particularly interest of the laboratory is to understand the communication between the leukemia cells and the bone marrow tissue where leukemia cells reside in and how the bone marrow tissue makes the leukemic cells resistant to therapeutic drugs.