Elly Tanaka

Tanaka was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and obtained a bachelor's degree in biochemistry from Harvard University in 1987 and a PhD from the University of California, San Francisco in 1993, where she had worked in the lab of Marc W. Kirschner.[1] She then became a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Jeremy Brockes at University College London and Ludwig Institute.[1]

Tanaka started her own lab at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden (Germany) in 1999.[1] Her research focused on axolotl spinal cord regeneration.[1]

In 2008, Tanaka became a professor at the Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden (CRTD) of the Technische Universität Dresden.[1] She became director of the center in 2014,[2] before becoming senior scientist at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna in 2016.[3] The Mexican salamander species axolotl is Tanaka's main model system for her research and is also working to translate them to mouse and human tissue.[4] Using innovative molecular biology and microscopy methods, she identified those stem cells that underlie the regeneration of limbs and the spinal cord.[5] She is a member of the Editorial Board for Developmental Cell.[6]

Tanaka was elected a member of the Academia Europaea in 2015[2] and of the European Molecular Biology Organisation in 2017.[7] She was awarded the Ernst Schering Prize in 2017, highlighting Tanaka as "the leading expert in the field of regeneration biology".[5] In 2018, she was awarded the Erwin Schrödinger Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences for lifetime achievements.[8] In 2020, she was awarded the FEBS | EMBO Women in Science Award.[9]