The EANO Youngsters Initiative

The EANO Youngsters Initiative started in 2012 aims to provide a platform for networking, interaction and collaboration between young scientists with a special interest in Neuro-Oncology. Therefore, the EANO Youngsters committee was formed to organize activities specially focusing on young scientists within the EANO. Here, the EANO Youngsters aim to represent the diversity of EANO with a lot of different specialties involved in Neuro-Oncology as well as to represent the different scientific interest from a clinical as well as a translational and basic science viewpoint. In the following we want to introduce the initiative, ourselves as well as to provide a broad overview on the planned activities.
The EANO Youngsters SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures)/Articles can be found here
The EANO Youngsters committee says “Hello”
Jan-Michael Werner
Jan-Michael Werner, MD, is currently a neurology resident at the University Hospital Cologne, Germany, and research fellow within the Cologne Clinician Scientist Program, supported by the German Research Council (DFG). His research work focuses on multimodal imaging including amino acid PET and advanced MRI as well as immunotherapy in patients with brain tumors.
George Petrescu
George Petrescu is currently a neurosurgery resident at “Bagdasar-Arseni” Clinical Emergency Hospital and PhD student at “Carol Davila” University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Bucharest, Romania. He is interested in finding new therapeutic targets for gliomas and improving the quality of life for the neuro-oncological patients following surgical resection.

Andrada Turcas
Andrada Turcas is a radiation oncology resident and PhD candidate from Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Currently she is a research fellow at the EORTC in Brussels, Belgium within SIOPE's QUARTET project, focusing on RTQA in pediatric radiotherapy clinical trials. Her interests include novel radiotherapy techniques and targeted therapies for paediatric and adult brain tumours.

Barbara Kiesel
Barbara Kiesel is a neurosurgeon at the Medical University of Vienna, Austria. Her research focus is analysis of disease progression and treatment-induced alterations in glioma.

Francesco Bruno
Francesco Bruno, MD, completed his Neurology Residency in 2021 and is currently attending a PhD programme at the Division of Neuro-Oncology, Department of Neurosciences, University of Turin, Italy. He is particularly involved in clinical research on glioma patients, with a special interest on lower-grade gliomas and brain tumour-related epilepsy. More recently, his research has also been focussed on the identification of markers of neurodegeneration in patients with Primary Central Nervous System Lymphomas (PCNSL) undergoing different treatment modalities.

Franziska Ippen
Franziska Maria Ippen, MD, is currently a neurology resident at the University Hospital Heidelberg, Germany, and a fellow of the National Center of Tumor Diseases (NCT) Heidelberg School of Oncology, a joint program with the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) Heidelberg. Her research focuses on targeted therapies in the field of neuro-oncology, brain metastases and leptomeningeal disease.

Iris Verploegh
Iris Verploegh is a MD-PhD candidate at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Her PhD, which is a joined program of the departments of Cell Biology and Neurosurgery, focusses on pathophysiology and treatment potential of developmental pathways in glioblastoma.
Lauritz Miarka
Lauritz Miarka is currently a MD candidate at the Christian-Albrechts-University in Kiel, Germany. He recently finished a research fellowship at the CNIO Madrid, Spain, where his work focussed on the therapeutic resistance of brain metastases.

Maximilian Mair
Maximilian Mair, MD, is working as a resident in Medical Oncology at the Division of Oncology of the Medical University of Vienna, Austria. His research focuses on clinical, (epi-)genetic and immunological markers in brain tumors with a particular interest in WHO grade 2-3 gliomas.

Sharon Berendsen
Sharon Berendsen MD PhD is currently working as a neurology resident in the University Medical Center Utrecht, The Netherlands. She obtained her PhD in Neuro-Oncology in 2020, which was focused on prognostic clinical and translational factors in glioblastoma. She is currently involved in postdoctoral research focusing on the mechanical characteristics of the glioblastoma microenvironment.

Together we aim to address the issues of young Neuro-Oncology scientists within the EANO and provide a platform for interaction as well as organize dedicated activates. Any ideas for new activities? Do not hesitate to contact us via the Facebook group or email: youngsters@eano.eu