Athanasia Papalopulu (born 1962) FMedSci FRSB is a Wellcome Trust senior research fellow and Professor of Developmental Neuroscience in the School of Biological Sciences, University of Manchester.

[1][2][3] After completing her undergraduate degree in Pharmacy at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, Nancy Papalopulu moved to London in 1986 to do a PhD at the National Institute for Medical Research, where she became one of Robb Krumlauf's first graduate students.

[7] In 1991, she moved to La Jolla, California to do postdoctoral work under the supervision of Chris Kintner at the Salk Institute.

In Cambridge, Nancy shared lab space with Sir John Gurdon, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2012 for his seminal work on Xenopus embryos that has underpinned our understanding of nuclear reprogramming.

Using computational modeling and experimental biology her group has discovered that oscillations of the microRNA miR-9 targets an important regulator of neuronal differentiation, HES1, allowing for precisely timed waves of neurogenesis.