Dr. Costas Lyssiotis has joined our MIP faculty as a tenured track assistant professor. Costas is joining us from Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, where he worked as a postdoctoral fellow under the direction of Dr. Lewis C. Cantley, Ph.D. Costas’ research interests focus on pancreatic cancer as related to metabolism and cell signaling. He has had an outstanding record throughout his training starting from his undergraduate school at the University of Michigan, and his PhD work at the Scripps Research Institute. He has been amazingly successful at securing funding including an NSF Predoctoral Fellowship (2006-2009, as a graduate student), a Damon Runyon Postdoctoral Fellowship award (2010-2013), a highly prestigious Pathway to Independence grant from the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network (2013-2018), and a Dale F. Frey Award for Breakthrough Scientists from the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation (2014-2016). Just a few weeks ago, he was honored with the 2015 Tri-Institutional Breakout Prize for Junior Investigators, a personal prize of $25,000 awarded to 6 early-stage investigators at Weill Cornell, Rockefeller University, and Memorial Sloan Kettering.
Costas will also have an appointment as assistant professor in the Department of Internal Medicine, Division of Gastroenterology, and will have laboratory and office space in the Cancer Center. Of note, Drs. John Carethers (Chair of Medicine), Chung Owyang (Chief of Gastroenterology), Ted Lawrence and Eric Fearon (Cancer Center Director and Deputy Director, respectively), Diane Simeone (Director, Translational Oncology Program), Chuck Burant (Director, Michigan Metabolomics and Michigan Nutrition centers) played key roles in making Costas’s recruitment possible. Costas joins several other faculty members in our department who are working on cancer or physiology of the exocrine pancreas including Howard Crawford, Chung Owyang, Diane Simeone, John Williams, Bishr Omary, and he is likely to collaborate with other members of our department including Ken Inoki.
We are fortunate and delighted to have Costas Lyssiotis as a member of our University of Michigan physiology family!