Ievgenia Pastushenko MD, PhD

Dr. Ievgenia Pastushenko is a dermatologist specializing in dermato-oncology and surgery and an Assistant Professor and Director of Laboratory at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in Brussels, Belgium. During the postdoc, she focused her work on understanding the mechanisms regulating epithelial tumor heterogeneity and epithelial-to-mesenchymal plasticity. She discovered the tumor transition states occurring during tumor progression and identified the subpopulation of cells responsible for metastasis. Recently, Ievgenia uncovered that loss of function of FAT1, a gene frequently mutated across many human cancers, promotes hybrid epithelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT) and defined the precise molecular mechanisms underlying this phenotype.