Dr Melanie Eckersley-Maslin is a Group Leader and Snow Fellow at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and a Research Fellow in the Department of Anatomy and Physiology at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her lab investigates epigenetic plasticity in development and cancer to explore how cell identity is established in embryos yet deregulated in cancers, with the ultimate aim to identify new therapeutic targets. Melanie completed her PhD in Molecular Biology at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s School of Biological Sciences in New York, USA with Professor David Spector before postdoctoral research in developmental epigenetics with Professor Wolf Reik at the Babraham Institute, Cambridge UK supported by an EMBO Fellowship, Marie Curie Independent Fellowship and a Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) Discovery Grant. In 2021, Melanie returned to Australia to establish her research lab supported by the Lorenzo and Pamela Galli Medical Trust. She is recipient of the 2020 MetCalf Prize for Stem Cell Research, a 2021 Snow Medical Research Fellowship and the 2023 Lorne Genome Millennium Prize.