Igor Adameyko

Adameyko showed that Schwann cell precursors, nerve-associated cells long assumed to be committed to a glial fate, are in fact multipotent progenitors. Within developing tissues they detach from nerves and generate neuroendocrine cells, autonomic neurons, melanocytes, mature Schwann cells and more, which rewrote how the field understands where peripheral cell types come from. The work appeared across Cell, Nature and Science.

His programme asks how cells compute their state during development of the neural crest and craniofacial structures. The group combines large-scale single-cell transcriptional measurement with colour-multiplexed lineage tracing and in vivo functional experiments in mouse, zebrafish and chick, and has built clone2vec, an AI representation of clonal structure for reading fate decisions out of that data.

He is Professor and Department Chair at the Center for Brain Research at the Medical University of Vienna, where he leads the Division of Neuroimmunology, and continues to run a group at Karolinska Institutet.

He took his MSc in biochemistry and his PhD at Lobachevsky University. His recognition includes the Flormanska Prize (2015), an ERC Consolidator Grant (2015), selection as an EMBO Young Investigator (2016), the Hans Wigzell Prize (2017), the Fernström Prize (2019) and an ERC Synergy Grant as coordinator (2020).