Dr Heather Cunliffe is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Pathology at the University of Otago, Dunedin School of Medicine. Her primary research focus is the discovery and validation of biomarkers that will impact therapeutic decision-making and improve treatment outcomes for breast cancer and ovarian cancer patients. Heather leverages genomic, biochemical and cell-biologic approaches to define and target the pathobiology underlying and driving malignant progression in treatment-refractory tumour contexts. Specific interests include triple negative breast cancer, mechanisms of endocrine resistance, inflammatory breast cancer and recalcitrant subtypes of ovarian cancer. Heather also has an interest and significant expertise in Biospecimen Science to empower genomics-enabled medicine. Heather completed her undergraduate training at Victoria University of Wellington and received her Ph.D. from the University of Otago. She then trained as a postdoctoral fellow from 1999-2004 in the Cancer Genetics Branch of the National Human Genome Research Institute, at the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Maryland. Her postdoctoral research focused on the role of hormones and growth factors in the development and progression of breast cancer. In 2004, Heather joined the research faculty at the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), a not-for-profit biomedical research institute in Phoenix Arizona, where she headed the Breast and Ovarian Cancer Research Unit for 10 years prior to returning to the University of Otago.