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A senior staff scientist at Fred Hutch Cancer Center, Irini Topalidou, PhD, is the first winner of the Genetics Society of America Mentorship Award who isn’t a principal investigator or faculty member.
She is the second overall winner of the annual award, which acknowledges “excellence in their contributions to the mentorship of geneticists at any career stage.”
The award alternates each year between principal investigators, or PIs, who run their own labs, and non-faculty members who help PIs carry out the daily work of their labs.
The Fred Hutch PI who nominated her, Aakanksha Singhvi, PhD, says Topalidou brings the experience and skills of a PI to both her science and her mentorship.
“She has the chops of a PI,” said Singhvi, who works in the Basic Sciences Division at Fred Hutch. “You can be a good mentor when you have a lot of experience and you’re a very sharp scientist yourself intellectually.”
Bridging the divide between principal investigators and lab trainees
Topalidou earned her PhD at the University of Crete and has worked in several labs and institutions in the United States, mostly at Columbia University and the University of Washington where she developed a reputation for being a good mentor.
That journey from PhD student to postdoctoral researcher has grown more difficult in recent years because of cuts to federal training grants and other support scientists rely on to help start their careers.
“It’s always been hard to do a PhD or a postdoc,” she said. “But nowadays it is hard to get money to support yourself in science or find a job. I understand all these concerns, and so I try to be there for them.”
Often students need practical guidance about how to perform an experiment, but sometimes they just need someone to listen to them without judgment.
“Sometimes it's just a coffee to listen to them complain a little bit about this and that,” Topalidou said. “I try to find the time to provide that because I know how hard it is to be a young scientist nowadays.”
Her experience at different institutions also enables her to see things from the perspective of the scientists who run the labs and bear the primary responsibility for mentorship.
“I can understand the student because I have been a student, but I can also understand the PI’s point of view because I have worked with many PIs and I have seen the challenges they face, which are very, very real,” Topalidou said. “Sometimes it can be difficult for trainees to get into the PIs’ shoes. From a trainee’s perspective, it can sometimes feel as if ‘they’re in their office and they’re not thinking of me’ or ‘they’re working on grants, and they don’t have time for me.’”
‘She loves the science and the hands-on mentoring and chose to focus on this rather than additional administrative demands of a PI. We have very few people like that, and when we meet them, we should hold them in good regard.’
― Fred Hutch basic scientist Dr. Aakanksha Singhvi
When problems arise, she considers it a lab problem, not a PI problem or a student problem, Singhvi said.
“She has this rare ability to be the bridge,” Singhvi said. “And it’s not just her position, it’s also the temperament that comes with it — the temperament of wanting to be a community builder, the temperament of wanting to be a good mentor and the temperament of wanting to do good science.”
That’s why Singhvi respects Topalidou’s choice to play that role in the lab rather than become a principal investigator.
“She loves the science and the hands-on mentoring and chose to focus on this rather than additional administrative demands of a PI,” Singhvi said. “We have very few people like that, and when we meet them, we should hold them in good regard.”
That’s why Singhvi nominated her for the GSA Mentorship Award.
“I appreciate Aakanksha so much because she went out of her way to nominate me, and I’m enormously grateful for that,” Topalidou said.
Connecting over C. elegans
It was a shared affinity for a tiny worm called Caenorhabditis elegans, an organism commonly studied because it shares many features with human biology, that brought Singhvi and Topalidou together.
Singhvi’s lab studies the nervous system of worms to learn more about glial cells, which play a key role in the human nervous system.
Topalidou worked with worms at Columbia University to study how neurons develop and form networks. She continued worm research at the University of Washington for a decade and then joined Fred Hutch where she worked with Jihong Bai, PhD, who also studies C. elegans in the Basic Sciences Division to understand how the brain works.
Bai and Singhvi both participate in the Seattle Worm Meeting, which Singhvi co-organizes. It’s a gathering of research groups from Fred Hutch, the University of Washington and a few other area institutions that specialize in C. elegans research.
That’s where Topalidou met Singhvi.
“We had befriended each other and then Aakanksha needed some help in her lab,” she said.
She worked in Singhvi’s lab for a few months before joining the Basic Sciences lab of Nicholas Lehrbach, PhD, which studies C. elegans to understand how cells regulate the degradation of proteins.
Topalidou chose to wait until next June to formally receive her award, so that the presentation will coincide with an international conference devoted to worm science.
“I think Irini wanted to make sure that she receives the award in front of the International C. elegans community,” Singhvi said. “It just so happens that the next International C. elegans meeting is not until next June.”
Mentoring relationships transcend labs and institutions
Topalidou’s reputation as a mentor means her counsel is in high demand.
“I won’t lie: there are days where I am completely swamped with work and I would rather be left alone,” she said.
But her motivation to devote time to mentoring isn’t purely altruistic.
“I definitely get something out of the mentoring,” she said. “I get to have a happy environment around me. I really like human connections. That’s why I know that putting in this effort will come back to me in that sense.”
She and Singhvi draw on their own experiences to mentor students on how to do science, but also about how to make a life in science.
“Aakanksha can bring something about being a woman in science and about being a PI following a non-traditional path,” Topalidou said. “Both of us are immigrants in this country and we know how hard it is to be missing home, how hard it is to miss your mother and to have second thoughts about living abroad.”
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The Genetics Society of America gave Topalidou an opportunity to write an article for the journal Genetics about leaving her home in Greece to make a “second life” in the United States and how that experience has shaped her life, career and approach to mentorship.
She said the mentoring relationships she has forged over the years continue.
“I have connections with all my students who were at Columbia,” she said. “I stayed there for eight years, and they now have their own labs or scientific careers. They contact me to read their papers or grants or for advice. You keep the relationship going. It never ends from the moment that you have touched someone’s heart.”
She said she’s grateful to work for an institution that shares that commitment to teaching the next generation of scientists at every level from elementary school to postdoctoral researchers.
“I haven’t seen anywhere this level of care in mentorship that Fred Hutch provides,” Topalidou said.