Elvan Böke

Elvan Böke

Centre de Regulació Genòmica

Life & Medical Sciences

Elvan graduated as valedictorian in her native Turkey in 2008. She completed her PhD training at the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute (2008-2012) on cell division, followed by postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA (2013-2016) on cytoplasmic organisation. In 2017, she established her laboratory at CRG, Barcelona. Elvan has received numerous honours, including two consecutive European Research Council Grants (Starting in 2017 and Consolidator in 2022), an EMBO Young Investigator Award in 2021, a Barcelona city prize (2022), a Vallee Scholar Award (2023), and both the Sabadell Biomedical Research Award and the EMBO Gold Medal in 2024.
Her research focuses on the strategies and mechanisms that allow oocytes to evade ageing for decades, and why these strategies eventually fail with advanced maternal age.

Research interests

Our lab addresses the following key question: How do oocytes, that form before birth, survive in the female body for long periods of time, up to 50 years in humans? Put another way, while somatic cells age and have a limited lifespan, germ cells can be thought of as immortal because they can generate a new young organism in each generation. To accomplish this remarkable feat of cellular longevity, oocytes must minimize damage to their cytoplasmic and nuclear components.
Our research focuses on the strategies and mechanisms that allow oocytes to evade ageing for decades, and why these strategies eventually fail with advanced maternal age.

Selected publications

– Zaffagnini G, Solé M, Duran JM, Polyzos NP & Böke E 2025, ‘The proteostatic landscape of healthy human oocytes‘, Embo journal. vol.44, 611–4630.
– de Souza SR, Böke E & Zaffagnini G 2025, ‘Proteostasis in cellular dormancy: lessons from yeast to oocytes‘, Trends in biochemical sciences, 50 – 8.

Selected research activities

Meeting organisation (2025).
In June 2025, I organised the meeting “Fertility, contribution of the maternal inheritance” in Paris, France. The event featured 15 invited speakers and attracted an audience of approximately 100 participants; registration fees were waived. The meeting was hosted by La Fondation Singer-Polignac (Paris). In November 2025, I served as a member of the organising committee for the Women, Biology & Health Workshop held in Barcelona, Spain, which gathered approximately 150 participants with no registration fee again and was hosted by IDIBAPS (Barcelona).
Invited Talks (2025)
In 2025, I participated in numerous invited international conferences and seminar series. These included invited talks at the the IVIRMA 11th International Congress (Barcelona, 2025), the Gordon Research Conference on Germinal Stem Cell Biology (Castelldefels, 2025), the Cell Symposia on Metabolites in Signaling and Disease (Sitges, 2025), the ASEBIR Annual Meeting (Barcelona, 2025), and the TSRM Reproductive Medicine Congress (Antalya, 2025). I was also invited to give seminars at several academic institutions, including the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, the Centro de Biología Molecular Severo Ochoa (CSIC-UAM, Madrid), the Biozentrum Discovery Seminar Series (Basel), and the Keynote Seminar Series at Institut Curie (Paris).