Ewa Paluch was born in Kraków and moved to Paris in the mid-1980’s as a child. She graduated in Physics from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon in 2001, and did a PhD in Biophysics at the Curie Institute in Paris between 2001 to 2005. She started her research group in 2006 at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, as a joint appointment with the International Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology in Warsaw.
In 2013, she was appointed Professor of Cell Biophysics at the Medical Research Council Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology, University College London (UCL). From 2014 to 2018, she also headed the new UCL Institute for the Physics of Living Systems, which promotes collaborations between physicists and biologists at UCL. In 2018 Ewa was elected Chair of Anatomy at the University of Cambridge. Ewa is the 19th Professor of Anatomy at Cambridge, and the first woman to hold this Chair in its 300-year history.
She has received a number of awards, including the Hooke Medal from the British Society for Cell Biology in 2017 and the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists in the UK in 2019. She became Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge, and was elected EMBO member in 2018. Ewa’s lab combines biology and physics to investigate how our cells control their shapes in health and disease.