Angelika Amon

Angelika Amon, Ph.D. (b. 1967) is an Austrian American molecular and cell biologist, and the Kathleen and Curtis Marble Professor in Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Amon's research centers on how chromosomes are regulated, duplicated, and partitioned in the cell cycle. Amon was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017.

Personal life and career

Amon was born and raised in Vienna, Austria. She displayed an early interest in plant and animal biology as a child, keeping a notebook full of newspaper clippings, and was motivated to study biology after learning about Mendelian genetics and seeing time-lapse micrographs of the division of plant cells in middle school. As of 2007, Amon was married and had two daughters.

Amon received an undergraduate degree in biology from the University of Vienna. She continued her doctoral work there beginning in 1989 under a newly hired Professor Kim Nasmyth at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP), receiving a Ph.D. in 1993. 1994 saw Amon leaving Austria for the United States, joining the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts as a postdoc, and was named a Whitehead Fellow in 1996, which allowed her to start her own laboratory at the Institute.

Her independent work at the Whitehead Institute led directly to her securing a faculty appointment at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT in 1999, the same year she received the Presidential Early Career Award and was named a Howard S. and Linda B. Stern Career Development Assistant Professor. Amon became an associate investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 2000, and was promoted to full professor at MIT in 2007; she had earlier achieved tenure as an assistant professor.

Amon was listed as a member of the Editorial Board for Current Biology in 2016, but no longer appears in this position as of 2019. She served on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) from 2009 to 2019.

In 2017, Amon was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, by which time she had been named the Kathleen and Curtis Marble Professor of Cancer Research at MIT.

In 2019, Amon was recognized as among those who have "made extraordinary contributions to their fields" while being a foreign-born researcher in the United States, via the Vilcek Prize.

Awards and honors

• 1998 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers
• 2003 Alan T. Waterman Award
• 2003 Eli Lilly and Company-Elanco Research Award
• 2007 Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research (shared with Todd R. Golub and Gregory J. Hannon)
• 2008 NAS Award in Molecular Biology
• 2013 Ernst Jung Prize
• 2018 Vanderbilt Prize in Biomedical Science
• 2019 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences
• 2019 Vilcek Prize