Erica Golemis

As a result of her graduate and post-doctoral work, Golemis was recruited to Fox Chase Cancer Center in 1993 to start her independent laboratory.^[2] Upon starting her laboratory, Golemis's research team were one of the first to describe the complete sequence of the NEDD9 gene and provided an initial functional analysis of NEDD9 protein.^[4] Based on this, Golemis demonstrated in 2009 that a decreased NEDD9 in living bodies also limited the appearance of aggressive metastatic breast cancer.^[5] She later built on this discovery and reported that NEDD9 also controlled the growth of progenitor cells that gives rise to tumors.^[6]

Throughout her tenure at Fox Chase, Golemis focused on improving cancer diagnosis and treatment through cell signalling pathways. As such, she was appointed the William Wikoff Smith Endowed Chair in Cancer Research in 2019.^[7] Following this promotion, Golemis was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for her work on the cell cilium.^[8] In 2020, Golemis was also appointed senior editor at eLife, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal.^[9]

In 2021, Golemis oversaw a research team that found that NEDD9 was a negative regulator of a signalling pathway controlling autophagy in early-stage non-small cell lung cancer.^[10] Later, she helped identify that the Musashi-2 protein had the potential to both identify targeted therapies for certain patients with non-small cell lung cancer and to serve as a target for the development of new therapies.^[11] In the following year, Golemis' laboratory examined 1,600 tumors with patterns of mutation in TP53 and CDKN2A in order to show that patterns of hotspot mutations in TP53 differed depending on the presence or absence of a co-occurring CDKN2A mutation.^[12]

• Erica Golemis publications indexed by Google Scholar