When Irini Topalidou was a PhD student at the University of Crete, she fell in love with C. elegans after attending an EMBO workshop on model systems. She admired the model organism’s fast lifecycle, genetic tractability, and ease in handling. She worked with C. elegans for eight years as a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University where she studied how neurons develop and form networks that contribute to behavior. She was happy and not looking for change.

Yet, the typical—and often expected—academic trajectory was graduate school, postdoc, then faculty, so she searched for a position where she could be in the lab and stay deeply connected to experiments. Topalidou took a position as a staff scientist first at the University of Washington and now at the Fred Hutch Cancer Center. There, she continues to use C. elegans as a genetic model and studies how the proteasome is regulated under different conditions as part of Nic Lehbach’s group.

Although staff scientist positions have been relatively rare, she feels “valued and really appreciated” and didn’t feel like she was “a postdoc who continues being a postdoc forever.” Since becoming a staff scientist, she’s advocated for the need for these positions by giving talks and writing about STEM education and career choices in Nature, Science, and our own Genes to Genomes blog.

She believes that staff scientists can fill a much needed role in a lab, where PIs must balance research output and mentorship. “It’s really challenging because the pressure that PIs have to write grants and bring money into the lab is extreme… and being able to combine that with proper mentoring is very challenging,” she says, further adding, “Staff scientists in the lab can help support the students and serve as an intermediate between a PI and a trainee.” 

A big part of her role is mentoring trainees both in her lab and across the division. Topalidou, recipient of the 2026 GSA Mentorship Award, now splits her time by dedicating about two-thirds to research and the remaining third to mentoring. Her current mentoring load includes four undergraduates, two graduate students, and a rotation student in the lab while she continues to mentor trainees from her previous labs.

“I try to inspire independence,” she says. “It’s something that’s very important to me and to [the mentees].” Training mentees to think through experiments on their own first allows them to become more confident in their skills, while for Topalidou, it gives her more time to focus on her own research.

Andrea Calixto, a professor at the University of Valparaiso and an investigator in the Center for Interdisciplinary Neuroscience of Valparaiso, was a PhD student in the lab where Topalidou did her postdoctoral research. She describes Topalidou as a natural mentor with a “very unique ability to listen to people.” When Calixto wrote her first paper, she didn’t know exactly how to approach it and Topalidou was the first person to give her feedback. She recalls, “It was her way of giving me feedback that really empowered me… my paper of course required work, but she made me feel like I could actually do it.” Even though their careers have taken them to different institutions, Calixto still turns to Topalidou for advice on grants, experiments, and relationships with other colleagues.

In addition to being a mentor to trainees that have gone through her lab, Topalidou also maintains a strong presence in the Seattle C. elegans meeting, a monthly gathering of around 15 C. elegans labs across the Pacific Northwest. Aakanksha Singhvi, an associate professor at the Fred Hutch Cancer Center and an affiliate professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine who organizes this meeting, met Topalidou through a mutual friend shortly after she arrived at Fred Hutch. Topalidou offered to help her set up her lab and years later, did a short stint there—during which she co-authored two publications and trained lab members in new techniques. Singhvi describes Topalidou as a “sunny person” with a “very positive energy” that persisted despite experimental setbacks. Despite the short time Topalidou spent in her lab, Singhvi mentions that it was through the Seattle C. elegans meeting that she truly got to know her through group discussions and feedback sessions. “How she interacts and engages with my lab is essentially what she does with the entire Pacific Northwest C. elegans community,” Singhvi says.

Reflecting on her career thus far, Topalidou says, “What a fascinating journey it has been. It doesn’t have to be a journey that follows the norm for it to be fascinating.”

Join us in congratulating Irini Topalidou on receiving the Genetics Society of America Mentorship Award for her outstanding contributions to mentoring many within the C. elegans community and beyond.

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