Dr Fatima Valdes Mora

I am a mid-early career researcher arising as an authority in cancer epigenetics, single-cell transcriptomics, and epigenomics. During my career, I have made seminal discoveries in the field of histone variants and cancer epigenetics (Genome Research 2012, Nature Comms 2017, and iScience 2019) where I demonstrated an oncogenic role for acetylation of the histone variant H2A.Z. In the last 5 years, I have also focused on cutting-edge technology implementation, single-cell RNAseq, for the understanding of tumour biology transcriptionally (Cell Reports 2021) and more recently epigenetically, single-cell ATAC-seq. One of the current main foci of my group is the understanding of the epigenetic causes of childhood cancer. https://www.ccia.org.au/about-the-institute/our-research/personalised-medicine/cancer-epigenetic-biology-and-therapeutics

I obtained my PhD in Molecular Biology, Biochemistry, and Biomedicine from CSIC (Autonoma University of Madrid, Spain) in December 2008. I completed my postdoctoral research at Prof Susan Clark’s lab (Garvan Institute, Sydney Australia) in 2013 and obtained a Group Leader appointment at Garvan in 2014 to lead the Histone Variant Group. I have recently joined the Children’s Cancer Institute as Team Leader of the “Cancer Epigenetic Biology and Therapeutics” lab. From 2014, I hold a conjoint Senior Lecturer position at UNSW Sydney that have allowed me to supervise multiple Masters, Honours, and PhD students

I have published 26 peer-reviewed papers since 2004 (15 as corresponding/first author), from which 15 have been published in the last 5 years. During my postdoctoral stage, I have attracted > €2.7 M of competitive funding (as fellowships and research grants) from both public and private Australian funding bodies, including, the highly competitive NHMRC project grants (current success rate is <10%), Cancer Institute NSW, Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia (PCFA), National Breast Cancer Foundation (NBCF) and Cure Cancer. I currently hold a CINSW Career Development Fellowship which is allowing her to establish my own research niche in epigenomics and cancer.

I have a passion for the development and implementation of novel technology that has allowed her to develop a multidisciplinary profile. I have a strong profile in molecular biology, epigenetics, single-cell transcriptomics, next-generation sequencing and bioinformatics interpretation of genome-wide data. I perform extremely well as a hinge joint between bioinformatics and biology, interpreting and integrating sequencing data into meaningful biological outputs.