Ivan Ahel, PhD

Ivan Ahel, PhD

Dr. Ivan Ahel is a Senior Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford. Ivan obtained MSc in Biology at the University of Zagreb, Croatia in 2000, before undertaking a PhD with thesis work carried out at Yale University in Prof Dieter Söll’s group between 2000 and 2003. In 2004, Ivan joined the Cancer Research UK, London Research Institute as a postdoctoral Fellow in Dr. Stephen West’s laboratory investigating novel DNA repair protein factors. He was appointed in 2009 as a Junior Group Leader at the Paterson Institute for Cancer Research in Manchester, before moving to the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, in 2013.

General interest of Ivan’s laboratory centres on the basic cellular mechanisms underlying genome stability and the signalling mediated by the poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) family of enzymes. In addition, the laboratory is keen to understand how defects in these processes link to human diseases such as cancer and neurodegeneration. Ivan’s laboratory has been funded by major grants from the Wellcome Trust, Cancer Research UK, Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and Ovarian Cancer Research Alliance. Since 2012 Ivan is a member of the EMBO Young Investigator Programme and he is also recipient of the prestigious 2013 Cancer Research UK Future Leaders in Cancer Research Prize.