2025 Prize Winner

The winner of the 2025 AAAS Martin and Rose Wachtel Cancer Research Award for outstanding contributions to the field by an early-career cancer researcher is...

Karin Pelka, PhD
Assistant Investigator, Gladstone-UCSF Institute of Genomic Immunology, Gladstone Institutes
Assistant Professor, Department of Microbiology and Immunology, UCSF

Talk Title: Discovering and Targeting Immune Hubs to Advance Cancer Immunotherapy

Dr. Pelka’s research aims to understand how immunological processes are regulated in human tissues with the goal to leverage the immune system in the fight against cancer. Dr. Pelka performed her PhD training at the Institute of Innate Immunity at the University of Bonn in Germany. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, she shifted her interest to cancer immunology and systems biology and led a multi-institutional single-cell RNA sequencing and spatial profiling effort on human colorectal cancer. Now, she is leading an interdisciplinary team as Assistant Investigator at the Gladstone-UCSF Institute of Genomic Immunology. She is also an Assistant Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at UC San Francisco and an Investigator at the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy.