Presenter: Mariya Licheva (Cornell University, USA)

When: Monday 2nd June, 14:00-14:50

Where: Online webinar via zoom, streamed during the ARCTiC Symposium held at Holmen Fjordhotell

Our next Rising Star is Mariya Licheva (Cornell University, USA), who presents her recent co-first author publication Phase separation of initiation hubs on cargo is a trigger switch for selective autophagy (Nature Cell Biology, 2025).

Mariya completed her Bachelor’s degree in Microbiology and Genetics and the University of Vienna in Austria in 2015, where she undertook a Bachelor’s thesis focusing on RNA editing under the supervision of Prof. Michael Jantsch. She also completed a 6-month internship at the Epigenetics Society with Dr. Michael Bennani-Baiti, where she contributed to the development of the organization’s website, created multiple drug-related databases, and compiled literature on the relationship between epigenetic modifications and oncogenesis. She then completed her Master’s degree in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at the University of Vienna in 2018 under the supervision of Prof. Claudine Kraft, where she focused on the role of Atg11 in selective autophagy.

Mariya then moved to the University of Freiburg in Germany with Prof. Kraft and completed her PhD in 2024, where she studied the molecular mechanisms of selective autophagy initiation and how autophagy can target diverse cellular structures for degradation. This work led to several co-first author publications in Nature Cell Biology and Nature Communications, and she was awarded the Hans-Griesebach Award for an outstanding dissertation in the fields of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. In 2024, she joined the lab of Prof. Martin Graef at Cornell University as a postdoctoral associate, where she is currently investigating the quantitative biology of autophagosome formation with a focus on COPII vesicles.