Dr Fatima (Fa) Valdes Mora is Team Leader of the Cancer Epigenetic Biology and Therapeutics lab at the Children’s Cancer Institute (CCI) in Sydney.

Fa obtained her PhD in Molecular Biology, Biochemistry and Biomedicine from CSIC (Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain) in 2008. She then moved to Sydney to spend five years at the Cancer Epigenetics Lab, headed by Professor Susan Clark, at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research. Fa obtained a Group Leader position in the Histone Variants group at Garvan in 2014, and she joined CCI as Team Leader in 2020.

Fa is a mid-career researcher rising as an authority in cancer epigenetics research; she has played an integral role in discovering novel genome-wide roles of the acetylation of the histone variant H2A.Z, generating significant international interest. 

Her passion for the development and implementation of novel technology has driven Fa to develop a strong multidisciplinary profile on cancer epigenetics, molecular and cellular biology, next-generation sequencing methodologies, single cell transcriptomics and epigenomics and bioinformatics interpretation of genome-wide data. Her current research focus is epigenetics in paediatric cancer and immuno-oncology.

Fatima was co-convenor of Epigenetics 2022.