Dimitris N. Chorafas Prize

Prize winner 2026 - Qi Chen

Qi Chen at the Department of Women´s and Children´s health, is awarded the prize for her thesis, Systems-level immunomonitoring in pediatric cancer and early life development

Prize motivation:
“Qi Chen has conducted a thesis entitled Systems-level immunomonitoring in pediatric cancer and early life development at the Department of Women’s and Children’s Health, Karolinska Institutet. Her doctoral thesis represents a genuine and substantial contribution to the fields of paediatric immunology, cancer immunology, and early-life immune development, addressing a fundamental challenge in paediatric medicine: understanding how the immune system of a child, whether facing cancer, premature birth, or the critical first months of life responds, adapts, and can be therapeutically guided. 

To do so, she has integrated results from a range of the most technically demanding approaches available in modern immunology including mass cytometry, plasma proteomics, bulk and single-cell RNA sequencing, T cell receptor sequencing and gut metagenomics. This has resulted in a series of high impact journal publications, including Cell, and has identified clinically actionable biomarkers with direct potential for translation into paediatric oncology practice publications describing results of considerable clinical translational importance.”

News article about the prize winner.