Marta Kovatcheva: 2025 winner

The winner of the 2025 EACR-Mark Foundation-Pezcoller Foundation Rising Star Award is Dr. Marta Kovatcheva

Marta Kovatcheva is originally from Sofia in Bulgaria and grew up in Toronto, Canada. She is currently a group leader at IFOM in Milan, Italy, and it is thanks to her research project “Controlling epithelial cell plasticity during tissue regeneration using one-carbon metabolism (PLAST-1C REGEN)” developed in her laboratory at the Milan institute that she won the Rising Star Award 2025.

The researcher commented: «Receiving this award is an incredible honor. Experimentally speaking, this recognition is a very exciting opportunity for the lab to embark on some of our most ambitious research lines, which we hope will significantly contribute to our understanding of cancer initiation and progression.»

This prestigious award is the result of collaboration with EACR and The Mark Foundation, and recognizes one cancer researcher annually and aims to support pioneering projects that can have a transformative impact on the field, to discover new therapies and increase hope and quality of life for patients.

WHO IS MARTA KOVATCHEVA?

In 2010, she received her bachelor’s degree in molecular genetics from the University of Toronto doing a thesis on the role of ubiquitin signaling in the response to DNA double-strand break damage, under the supervision of Dr. Daniel Durocher.
In 2010, she moved to New York to continue her doctoral studies at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) with the guidance of Dr. Andrew Koff. She then joined Dr. Manuel Serrano’s lab in 2017 at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine in Barcelona, Spain, for her postdoctoral research.
In 2024, she has arrived at IFOM in Milan to start her research group: the Laboratory of Cell Plasticity & Aging.