Professor Kaylene Simpson heads the Victorian Centre for Functional Genomics at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne Australia and holds a joint appointment with the Department of Biochemistry and Pharmacology, University of Melbourne. She completed her BSc (Hons) at Monash University in plant science (1992) and spent 3 years as a research assistant at Florigene Pty Ltd (blue rose company) before undertaking a PhD in lactation and mammary gland biology at the Victorian Institute of Animal Science (1998). Her first postdoc was a shared appointment with Prof Melissa Brown (Uni Melb) and Profs Jane Visvader and Geoff Lindeman (WEHI) where she studied BRCA1 dependent breast cancer and developed the methodology that led to the identification of mammary gland stem cells. In 2002 she moved to Boston as a senior postdoc and then Instructor in the Dept Cell Biology, Harvard Medical School in the lab of Prof Joan Brugge.

Returning to Melbourne in 2008 to head the VCFG, she has built a team of highly skilled research assistants and postdocs who enable researchers to perform unbiased target discovery using high throughput approaches including CRISPR, RNAi and compound screening in both 2D and 3D underpinned by sophisticated cell phenotyping using high content imaging. The VCFG team customise analysis for each specific project. Kaylene is a strong advocate for alternate career paths and is a formal and informal mentor to many researchers.