Andrea Pauli elected to the Academia Europaea
The Academia Europaea has elected Andrea Pauli, Senior Group Leader at the IMP, as one of its members in recognition of her research on the molecular mechanisms of fertilisation and early embryonic development.
Andrea Pauli, Senior Group Leader at the IMP, has been elected as a member of the Academia Europaea, a prestigious Pan-European academy dedicated to excellence in scholarship across the humanities and sciences.
Founded in 1988, the Academia Europaea comprises over 5,500 distinguished scholars, including 88 Nobel laureates. Membership is by invitation only and follows a rigorous peer-review process, recognising individuals who have demonstrated sustained academic excellence and impact in their field.
Pauli, who joined the IMP as a group leader in 2015 and was promoted to senior faculty in 2022, has made significant contributions to understanding the molecular events that initiate life. Her lab investigates the oocyte-to-embryo transition, with a particular focus on fertilisation and translational regulation. Combining genetics, molecular biology, and AI-driven structural predictions and biochemistry, her team studies how sperm and egg interact and how the egg cytoplasm is transformed from a dormant to an active state to support embryogenesis.
In a recent study published in Cell, Pauli and her collaborators identified a conserved fertilisation complex that acts as a molecular “lock-and-key” mechanism across vertebrates. This discovery, which relied on AlphaFold-based structural predictions and in vivo experiments in zebrafish, mice, and human cells, sheds light on one of the earliest and most crucial steps in the origin of life.
“It’s an honour to be elected to the Academia Europaea,” says Pauli. “This recognition highlights the collaborative spirit and dedication of my team, and the incredibly supportive environment we’re part of at the Vienna BioCenter.
About Andrea Pauli
Andrea Pauli studied biochemistry at the University of Regensburg and molecular and cellular biology at the University of Heidelberg before starting her doctoral research at the IMP in 2004 in the labs of Barry Dickson and Kim Nasmyth. She continued her PhD with Nasmyth at the University of Oxford, studying chromosome segregation. In 2009, she joined the lab of Alexander Schier at Harvard University as a postdoctoral researcher, where she began investigating the role of previously unannotated small proteins during early embryogenesis. Pauli returned to the IMP as a Group Leader in 2015 and was promoted to Senior Group Leader in 2022. Pauli was elected to the EMBO Young Investigator Program in 2018 and became an EMBO Member in 2021. She received the HFSP Career Development Award (2015), the FWF Start Prize (2017), the Whitman Center Early Career Fellowship (2018), an HFSP Young Investigator Grant (2020), and an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2022.
Further reading: