Fatima Valdes Mora

Biography

Dr Fatima Valdes Mora completed her PhD in 2008 at Spanish National Research Council (CSIC, Spain) and moved to Australia in 2009 to join the Cancer Epigenetics group at the Garvan Institute. Fatima’s PhD and postdoctoral career are in the field of Cancer Epigenetics Research. Her interest in histone variants and the interaction with other epigenetic factors started in 2009 as part of her postdoctoral project. In 2013, she became the group leader of the Histone Variants group as a new independent branch within the Epigenetics Research Program. The major interest of the Histone Variant Group is to study the molecular mechanisms of how histone variants regulate aberrant gene transcription in cancer; these molecular events involve the effects of histone variants in other epigenetic mechanisms in particular in nucleosome positioning as well as the upstream machinery that regulates the incorporation of histone variants into the chromatin. Since starting her scientific career in 2004, Fatima has published 14 papers and is also an inventor of a patent. She currently holds a National Breast Cancer Foundation/ Cure Cancer Australia Foundation Postdoctoral Training Fellowship (4 years, 2013-2017).  She is Co-Investigator in a NHMRC project grant that it is currently funding her research. She is also a member of the Australian Society for Medical Research, workplace equity committee and advisory board member of the 2015 Next Generation Sequencing and Single Cell genomics and transcriptomics Asia Congress.  

Research Interest

Histone variants Epigenetics of Elf5 in anti-estrogen resistant breast cancer Nucleosome positioning. Readers and drives of the incorporation of histone variants into the nucleosomes. Next generation sequencing techniques Clinical significance of the expression of histone variants in cancer Single-cell epigenomics