Gabriella Ficz is a Principal Investigator and Reader at Barts Cancer Institute, Queen Mary University London. She studied Biochemistry, as an undergraduate in Romania, and completed her PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany at the International MSc/PhD Research School in Molecular Biology, with Prof Donna Arndt-Jovin. For her postdoctoral work, she joined the group of Prof Wolf Reik at Babraham Institute in Cambridge to research on epigenetic reprogramming in the mammalian system. Among her discoveries are mechanism that drive global DNA methylation erasure in naïve pluripotency states in both mouse and human, and she was at the forefront of discoveries identifying the functional roles of a new epigenetic mark, 5-hydroxymethylcytosine. In 2013 she started her own group to study the epigenetic nature of cancer initiation, was awarded a Medical Research Council New Investigator Grant and since then published research demonstrating the role of aberrant epigenetic marks in derailing cellular physiology in vitro and in vivo. She is interested in mechanisms that corrupt normal cells to transform into cancer cells in vivo, agnostic to underlying mutations and pan-cancer relevant, and aims to identify preventive tools to stop cancer before it has a chance to start.