Yonatan Stelzer Earns the 2025 ISSCR Outstanding Young Investigator Award
Honored for Breakthrough Approaches to Addressing Fundamental Problems in Mammalian Development
The International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) is honoring Yonatan Stelzer, Ph.D. with the 2025 ISSCR Outstanding Young Investigator Award. Dr. Selzer is an associate professor in the Department of Molecular Cell Biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel.
The award recognizes the exceptional achievements of an investigator in the early part of his or her independent career in stem cell research. Dr. Stelzer will present his work at the ISSCR 2025 Annual Meeting taking place in Hong Kong 11-14 June 2025.
“Yonatan Stelzer’s innovative approach to real-time, single-cell resolution methylation detection has raised the bar in the study of epigenetics,” said Rudolf Jaenisch, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, and Jacob Hanna, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, who jointly led the nomination. “His work revealed insights into the dynamic nature of epigenetic maintenance in post-implantation embryos, challenging conventional knowledge. Further, his research on embryonic development, including the creation of time-resolved models for mouse and rabbit gastrulation, has opened new doors in our understanding of mammalian development. Yonatan’s impressive blend of experimental mastery and intellectual curiosity continues to push the boundaries of developmental biology, making him an exceptional young leader in the field.”
“I am excited to congratulate Dr. Yonatan Stelzer and team on receiving the 2025 ISSCR Outstanding Young Investigator Award,” ISSCR President Valentina Greco said. “His outstanding work has already made a significant impact in the field. I look forward to following Dr. Stelzer and his team over the years as they will continue to contribute to our field with their discoveries.”
“I am deeply honored to receive this recognition from the ISSCR and humbled to be included among the remarkable scientists previously awarded the Outstanding Young Investigator Award,” Yonatan Stelzer, Ph.D. said. “This achievement would not have been possible without the dedication, deep engagement, and hard work of my team, as well as the invaluable and enduring support of the Weizmann Institute.”
Yonatan Stelzer is driven by the question of how multicellular organisms achieve variation despite identical genetic information. His research focuses on mammalian post-implantation development, aiming to establish fully data-driven quantitative models of spatiotemporal processes across diverse species. By bridging such phenomenological models with classical approaches from stem cell biology, transgenics, developmental biology, and epigenetics, Dr. Stelzer’s group has developed strategies to derive novel understanding of function and regulation of this process. Key contributions include the dissection of epigenetic mechanisms that regulate and memorize functional embryonic programs, as well as the study of non-cell-autonomous interactions, such as signaling between embryonic and extraembryonic lineages, that orchestrate cell specification and patterning of the early mammalian embryo.
The 2025 ISSCR Outstanding Young Investigator Award is supported by the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute.
ISSCR 2025 is the largest meeting in the world gathering leading innovators in the field of stem cell research and regenerative medicine. The meeting co-sponsored The University of Hong Kong, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and will take place 11-14 June 2025 in Hong Kong. Submissions for late-breaking abstracts are open until 19 March 2025.
About ISSCR
With nearly 5,000 members from more than 80 countries, the International Society for Stem Cell Research (@ISSCR) is the preeminent global, cross-disciplinary, science-based organization dedicated to stem cell research and its translation to the clinic. The ISSCR mission is to promote excellence in stem cell science and applications to human health.
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