Vincenzo Calvanese

Vincenzo Calvanese is an Italian stem cell biologist who left the University of California, Los Angeles after more than a decade to open a new research group at the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute in Barcelona, Spain, funded in part by Spain's Atrae researcher-relocation grant.

Calvanese completed his PhD in molecular biology at the Autonomous University of Madrid in 2010, working at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre and Spanish National Biotechnology Centre. He then moved to the US for postdoctoral training, first studying the epigenetic regulation of HIV latency at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, before joining Hanna Mikkola's laboratory at UCLA's Broad Stem Cell Research Center in 2012, where he remained as a postdoc and later project scientist studying the gene regulation of human hematopoietic stem cells. He briefly held a Junior Group Leader position at University College London from 2021 before returning to UCLA.

In 2024, Calvanese's group opened a new location at the Josep Carreras Institute, funded by a European Research Council Consolidator grant, Spain's Atrae grant, and additional support from the Josep Carreras Foundation and the Catalan regional government, to expand his studies on human hematopoietic stem cells and devise new methods to treat leukemia and other blood diseases. He was one of more than half of Atrae's 2024 grant recipients who were based in the US at the time of their award — a sharp increase driven by researchers citing the Trump administration's policies. Calvanese described the decision to move as "very simple."