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Amon was a highly respected cancer researcher at MIT’s Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a professor of biology at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. “She was an extraordinary person, an incredible and creative scientist, a vivacious and energetic colleague and a dedicated mentor. Her influence and legacy endure,” the MIT tweet read.
“We are very sad that Angelika Amon, a first generation PhD student at IMP, a former IMP board member and a longtime friend of the house, lost her fight with cancer. Your contributions to science form a lasting legacy for which we are grateful. Our thoughts are with his family, “the IMP tweeted.
Amon, born on January 10, 1967 in Vienna, studied biology at the University of Vienna and was one of the first students of the Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP), inaugurated in 1988. With his then head Kim Nasmyth he did his master’s thesis and later his doctorate (1994). He then went to the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge (USA) and moved to MIT in 1999, where he held a chair in cancer research from 2011. From 2010 to 2013 he was a member of the supervisory board of the Austrian Science Fund FWF and was a member of the scientific advisory councils of the Institute of Science and Technology (IST) Austria and the IMP.
In mid-September, Amon hosted an online conference invited by IST Austria and the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW). The researcher has been a member of the OeAW since 2015.
In his scientific work, Amon was aware of the cellular causes of cancer development. She investigated the phenomenon of “aneuploidy” in yeast cells. It refers to genetic defects that arise during cell division, which can consist of excess or missing sets of chromosomes and are responsible for the most serious diseases, including cancer.
For his work on the consequences of “aneuploidy” on cell physiology and tumor development, he received one of four revolutionary awards in the life sciences in 2018. With a cash prize of three million dollars (2, 6 million euros), the honor is considered the world’s most gifted scientific award. The previous year she was honored as a “Great Immigrant” by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The philanthropic fund honors naturalized individuals who have made a remarkable contribution to the advancement of American society. In 2013 he received the Ernst Jung Prize for Medicine in Hamburg. At the time, in the APA interview, he cited the main reason why he did not want to return to Austria “that I do not want to retire. In the US. You can work until you die as long as you bring funds for research, and that is what I really plan to do. “
