Associate Professor Pilar Blancafort completed her Bachelor of Science at the University of Barcelona, and her PhD at the University of Montreal in the field of Biochemistry in 1999. She pursued her postdoctoral studies at the Scripps Research Institute, California in the field of genome-engineering . In 2005, she established her own laboratory at the University of North Carolina, as Assistant Professor and later as tenured Associate Professor in 2011. In 2012, Professor Blancafort moved her laboratory at the University of Western Australia. In 2014, she joined the Perkins as Head of the Laboratory in Cancer Epigenetics. Pilar is a specialist in genome engineering and gene targeting and her laboratory has pioneered the development of engineered DNA binding proteins to modulate the epigenetic state of cancer cells and delivery strategies for tumor targeting in pre-clinical studies. She has received several awards, including awards from the Department of Defense Breast Cancer Program, American Lung Association, several cancer nanotechnology awards, NCI/NIH awards, a Cancer Council of Western Australia Research Fellowship and a ARC Future Fellowship and a National Breast Cancer Novel Concept award.