Christina Stankey, PhD student at the Crick, has won the International Birnstiel Award for Doctoral Research in Molecular Life Sciences.
Christina works in James Lee’s lab at the Crick, studying the genetic mechanisms of inflammatory bowel disease. Her work describing the central role of ETS2 gene in multiple inflammatory diseases was published in Nature early this year.
She joins five other winners of the Birnstiel Award, which celebrates research successes of young, up-and-coming scientists. It is awarded annually by the Max Birnstiel Foundation and the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP).
Christina spoke about her research, the recent paper, and studying a PhD at the Crick.
I was surprised and thrilled! The paper that led to the award represents years of hard work from a brilliant team of scientists, so it’s very gratifying to see our contribution recognised in this way.
Image of a type of inflammatory liver disease, which often occurs at the same time as IBD, with ETS2 target genes (yellow and cyan) at the site of disease.
- Christina StankeyIn the Nature paper, we discover that ETS2 is a master regulator of macrophage inflammatory responses and show that the ETS2 pathway is potentially druggable in disease. I began this work as an MPhil student in James’s lab. While we planned for a small project, we soon realised that we had stumbled onto something much bigger. Over the next three years, we figured out what ETS2 is doing in macrophages, why dysregulation of the ETS2 pathway drives disease, and how to target it therapeutically. After submitting the manuscript, we had several action-packed months of revisions, adding a dozen more techniques and analyses. It was an exciting journey, and all the more rewarding when the paper was published.
We are enormously proud of the paper and hoped that the scientific community would find it an important step forward. That said, we did not anticipate the incredible interest of the public! It’s deeply moving to receive messages from people affected by inflammatory disease and to hear that our research is a source of hope for so many. We have some of these messages printed out and pinned up in the lab as a reminder of what our work is all about.
The research has been one exciting moment after the next! The early days were particularly intriguing because we found that if we knocked out ETS2, macrophages completely lost the ability to be inflammatory. This was our first hint that ETS2 might play a central role in immune regulation and disease pathogenesis.
I feel very lucky to do a PhD at the Crick. It’s inspiring to be in a place filled with leading experts, incredible resources, and a culture of collaboration and interdisciplinary thinking. This creates remarkable opportunities to learn and contribute to great science as a student. Every day there’s a new reason to look forward to coming into lab!
There are many ways of doing science – different subject areas, different lab cultures, and different ways of asking and answering questions. Because of this, I’ve found that seeking out an array of scientific experiences is incredibly valuable.
I am continuing to work on targeting the ETS2 pathway therapeutically, and am studying other genetic mechanisms of inflammatory disease.
PhD students at the Crick follow a 4-year programme, agreed with partner universities King’s College London, UCL and Imperial College London, which is due to open shortly for 2025 applicants.
Sarah Martin, Head of Student Programmes at the Crick, said: “We are incredibly proud of Christina upon winning this award, it is a testament to her hard work and dedication. We are particularly delighted as the Birnstiel Award has been announced on the same week that we welcome 52 new students onto the Crick PhD programme, and we are also getting ready to launch our recruitment for up to 60 new Crick PhD students for September 2025.”
