Rate My Professor Cassie Stylianou

Cassie Stylianou completed her Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Otago's Department of Pathology and Biomedical Science on the Christchurch campus. Her thesis, titled "Copy number variants and endometrial cancer risk," was supervised by Dr. Logan Walker and Associate Professor John Pearson within the Mackenzie Cancer Research Group. Stylianou's research specializes in computational biology, cancer biology, and population genetics, with a focus on germline copy number variants contributing to endometrial cancer susceptibility. She investigates how these structural genomic variations influence cancer risk through analysis of large-scale genotyping arrays and whole-genome sequencing data from international consortia.

In 2024, as lead author, Stylianou published "Germline copy number variants and endometrial cancer risk" in Human Genetics (volume 143, pages 1481-1498), demonstrating significant associations between specific CNVs and increased endometrial cancer odds, including novel risk loci overlapping known susceptibility genes. Additional key publications include her contribution to "E-cadherin-deficient cells have synthetic lethal vulnerabilities in plasma membrane organisation, dynamics and function" in Gastric Cancer (2019, volume 22, issue 2, pages 273-286), which identified potential therapeutic targets in E-cadherin mutant cancers. She also authored "Copy number variants and endometrial cancer risk" in the Proceedings of the University of Otago Student Research Symposium (2019) and presented "In silico detection of candidate synthetic lethal gene pairs using cancer genomics data" at the Queenstown Molecular Biology Meetings (2017). Stylianou's outstanding research communication was honored with the University of Otago Three Minute Thesis Doctoral category win in 2019 for "Unravelling the genetic variants contributing to endometrial cancer risk," the Matariki Network of Universities 3MT People's Choice award, and the Canterbury Medical Research Foundation Prize for Best Postgraduate Presentation. Prior to her doctorate, she earned a Bachelor of Biomedical Science from the University of Otago, receiving Genetics prizes in 2016 and 2017.