Professor Constanze Bonifer receives the 2025 Donald Metcalf Award, from the International Society for Experimental Hematology (ISEH). Chosen for her outstanding work in the fields of epigenetic and gene regulatory processes regulating blood cell development and differentiation, and how these processes go astray in the development of blood cancer. Professor Bonifer has been a pioneer and world leader in these areas and a source of inspiration and guidance for many scientists working in experimental haematology.
Professor Bonifer is currently Emeritus Professor of Experimental Haematology at the University of Birmingham and Principal Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Whilst at Birmingham Constanze held a programme grant from Blood Cancer UK, as well as grants from the BBSRC, the MRC, CRUK and the Kay Kendall Leukaemia fund, along with several studentships, which together have made her outstanding contributions to the field possible.
Professor Bonifer has made many seminal contributions to the understanding of how epigenetic processes and transcription factors regulate blood cell development. Her early work on identifying individual gene contributions provided important insights into the molecular principles of enhancers in developmentally controlled gene regulation. She has been a pioneer in using molecular biology and genome wide ‘omics’ techniques combined with systems biology and mathematical modelling, to identify gene regulatory networks that establish and maintain blood cell fates. This work ultimately uncovered the mechanisms by which key transcription factors, like Runx1, play in these processes.
In parallel, Professor Bonifer applied her sophisticated insights and knowledge to make new inroads into our understanding of how deregulation of blood cell development contributes to leukemogenesis. Her early beliefs that transcriptional malfunction was at the heart of tumorigenesis, strongly shaped the cancer epigenetics field. Finally, her studies of the transcriptional regulation of blood cell development in mouse embryonic stem cells, provides essential clues about blood cell differentiation derived from human ES/iPSC cells.
Professor Bonifer started her scientific career in Germany where she completed her BSc in Cologne and her PhD in Heidelberg. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden and the National Institute of Medical Research, London, UK, Professor Bonifer returned to Germany as an Assistant Professor at the University of Freiburg. She next relocated her group to the University of Leeds, UK, where she became the Head of Section of Experimental Haematology, and subsequently took up the Chair of Experimental Haematology at, what was then, the Institute of Cancer and Genomic Sciences at the University of Birmingham.
In addition to her academic roles, she has worked closely with ISEH, including being on the Board of Directors.
