Angelika Amon Biography, Age, Height, Wife, Net Worth and Family

Amon was married to Johannes Weis. Together, they had two daughters (Theresa and Clara). She died on October 29, 2020. She was 53, and suffered from ovarian cancer in the two-and-a-half years leading up to her death.

Amon was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017, by which time she had been named the Kathleen and Curtis Marble Professor of Cancer Research at MIT. She was conferred the Vilcek Prize two years later, in recognition of her as one who had “made extraordinary contributions to their fields” while being a foreign-born researcher in the United States.

Amon was listed as a member of the Editorial Board for Current Biology in 2016, but no longer appears in this position as of 2019. She served on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) from 2009 to 2019.

Amon’s independent work at the Whitehead Institute led directly to her securing a faculty appointment at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT in 1999, the same year she received the Presidential Early Career Award and was named a Howard S. and Linda B. Stern Career Development Assistant Professor. Amon became an associate investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 2000, and was promoted to full professor at MIT in 2007; she had earlier achieved tenure as an assistant professor.

The Amon lab primarily investigates yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) as a model for understanding the controls that govern cell-cycle progression and received an Early Career Award grant, a PECAS award, from he NIH for this work in 1998. The PECAS is “the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on young professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers”. As a Whitehead Fellow, her team discovered that CDC20 plays a crucial role in cell division. Her Whitehead team identified an interaction between phosphatase and CDC14 which initiates the exit of cells from mitosis to the G1 phase. Amon’s team demonstrated that CDC20 is the target protein in the spindle checkpoint during mitosis.

During her time as a post-doctoral fellow at the Whitehead Institute in the 1990s, Amon turned from yeast to fruit flies in the laboratory of Ruth Lehmann, though she found fruit flies to be a far less attractive model than yeast; “once you had worked with yeast, you were spoiled”, she said.

Amon received an undergraduate degree in biology from the University of Vienna. She continued her doctoral work there beginning in 1989 under a newly hired Kim Nasmyth at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP), receiving a PhD in 1993. Amon left Austria for the United States in 1994, joining the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts as a postdoctoral researcher. She was named a Whitehead Fellow in 1996, which allowed her to start her own laboratory at the Institute.

Angelika Amon (January 10, 1967 – October 29, 2020) was an Austrian American molecular and cell biologist, and the Kathleen and Curtis Marble Professor in Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Amon’s research centered on how chromosomes are regulated, duplicated, and partitioned in the cell cycle. Amon was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017.