Bodossaki Distinguished Young Scientist Awards 2025
Life Sciences:Biomedical Sciences
“I am very honored to receive the Bodossaki Distinguished Young Scientist Award. This award is particularly meaningful to me given the deep appreciation I have for my Greek heritage and the long tradition of scientific excellence that this award represents. I am incredibly grateful to the Bodossaki Foundation for recognizing my lab’s work and for acknowledging the fundamental importance that scientific research plays in our society. I want to express my sincere thanks to the selection committee, to my mentors, and to my family for their support.”
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Stavroula Hatzios is an Associate Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology and of Chemistry in the Microbial Sciences Institute at Yale University. Her lab develops chemical approaches to discover proteins and metabolites that regulate interactions between bacterial and host cells in the gastrointestinal tract. By merging the fields of chemistry and microbiology, her lab aims to identify new therapeutic targets for gastrointestinal infections and associated cancers.
Stavroula was born in September 1983 in Blacksburg, Virginia, to a Greek mother from Sykia, Lakonias (near Monemvasia) and a Greek father from the city of Florina in the province of Florina. As a child, she learned Greek at home and spent many afternoons in the lab of her father, who was a Professor of Plant Pathology and Associate Dean at Virginia Tech. Her mother was also an instructor at Virginia Tech in marketing and later established the modern Greek language program at the same school.
Stavroula received her B.S. in Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she worked with Sarah E. O’Connor, and her Ph.D. in Chemistry with Carolyn Bertozzi at the University of California, Berkeley. As a graduate student, Stavroula discovered a mechanism that regulates the cell biology and antibiotic resistance of the tuberculosis pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis. After earning her Ph.D., she was awarded a global health research fellowship to study M. tuberculosis infection in Uganda.
Stavroula completed her postdoctoral work in Matthew Waldor’s lab at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where she was a Charles A. King Trust Postdoctoral Fellow. There, she used chemical proteomics to identify host and pathogen enzymes active in an animal model of cholera.
In 2017, she began her independent lab as an Assistant Professor at Yale and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2024. The primary goal of her lab’s research program is to understand how bacterial and host cells adapt to oxidative stress during infection, which contributes to the development of severe diseases including gastrointestinal cancers.
Stavroula is the recipient of several early-career awards including a Beckman Young Investigator Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship in Chemistry, and an ACS Infectious Diseases/ACS Division of Biological Chemistry Young Investigator Award.