Katerina Politi appointed Madri Professor of Pathology
Katerina Politi, a professor of pathology who co-leads the Cancer Signaling Networks Research Program at the Yale Cancer Center, was recently appointed the Joseph A. and Lucille K. Madri Professor of Pathology. The appointment is for a term of 10 years, renewable by the dean of the Yale School of Medicine (YSM).
Politi’s research centers on lung cancer, with a focus on understanding mechanisms of tumorigenesis and studying sensitivity and resistance to targeted therapies and immunotherapies. She has long-standing expertise on the subset of lung adenocarcinomas that harbor mutations in the EpidermalGrowth Factor Receptor (EGFR) gene. She also serves as scientific director of the Center for Thoracic Cancers.
She completed her biological sciences degree at the University of Pavia, Italy and received her Ph.D. with distinction in genetics and development from Columbia University in 2003. Politi remained at Columbia as a postdoctoral research scientist before moving to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center where she was a research fellow and started working on lung cancer.
In 2010, she was recruited to join the faculty of Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Pathology as an assistant professor, with a secondary appointment in 2011 in the Department of Medicine. In 2016 she was promoted to associate professor and, in 2023, was promoted to professor.
She leverages her expertise on drug resistance and has applied it to understanding and overcoming both targeted and immunotherapy resistance. While targeted and immuno-therapies are extending the lives of patients with lung cancer, they rarely lead to cures and new insights into mechanisms of tumorigenesis and drug resistance are needed. Key areas of emerging research in her laboratory that address this challenge include identification of new vulnerabilities of lung cancers that can be leveraged therapeutically, and uncovering the links between resistance, cancer cell plasticity, the tumor microenvironment and tumor heterogeneity.
