Youth@MBE > Youth Invited Speakers

Julie Di MARTINO, New York Medical College, New York, USA

Julie Di Martino comes from the Southwest region of France. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Cell Biology, a Master of Science in Genetics, and a Ph.D. in Cell Biology supervised by Dr F. Saltel from the University of Bordeaux, France. Her PhD work identified the collagen receptor DDR1 as driver of linear invadosomes formation necessary to support tumor cell invasion. Shortly after graduating, she moved to New York City in 2016 to complete her postdoctoral training at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital, New York, in the laboratory of Dr JJ Bravo-Cordero, focusing on the role of the extracellular matrix in cancer dormancy. In 2020, Dr. Di Martino was awarded an Early Career Investigator Award from the METAvivor Foundation for supporting her breast cancer research. She was awarded the 2022 Rupert Timpl award from the International Society for Matrix Biology in recognition of her postdoctoral work recently published in Nature Cancer. Julie Di Martino has published over 20 publications in respected peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of Cell Biology, Cancer Discovery, Nature, Nature Cancer, and Cell. She has trained numerous students in the last decade, providing strong support and mentoring, and is committed to training and mentoring the next generation of scientists. Julie Di Martino joined New York Medical College as an Assistant Professor in July 2022. Her research focuses on the biology of dormant cancer cells and the role of ECM in dissemination and dormancy escape, key to metastatic outgrowth.

Anna HENNINO, Cancer Research Center, Lyon, France

Ana HENNINO is an INSERM Researcher at the Cancer Research Center of Lyon (France) and Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder of the StromaCare company. She completed her PhD as an ENS student in Immunology at the INSERM in Lyon in 2001. She developed during PhD studies expertise in molecular mechanisms involved in apoptosis in B cell compartment and identified c-FLIP as a key regulator of the apoptosis of B cells in the germinal center. Through her post-doctoral studies in the field of immunology of allergy she demonstrated an important role of the CD8+T cell response at the initiation of the skin-allergic immune response. Since 2014, her research in Cancer Research Center Lyon focuses on the regulation of the immune response by the stromal compartment in the context of autoimmunity and cancer.