Dr. Louise Van der Weyden is a Senior Staff Scientist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. She completed a B.Sc. (Biomedical Science) at the University of Sydney, Australia with 1st Class Honours and received the University Medal in 1997. She then completed a Ph.D. in cancer biology at the University of Sydney in 2001, before starting as a post-doctoral fellow in Professor Allan Bradley’s Lab at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. During her time at the Sanger Institute, she was awarded a National Health and Medical Research Council CJ Martin & RGMenzies Fellowship (Australia) in 2002, an Intermediate Fellowship from the KayKendall Leukaemia Foundation (UK) in 2007 and became a William Guy ForbeckResearch Foundation Scholar (USA) in 2014. In 2017, she was awarded the University of Technology Alumni Award for Excellence (Faculty of Science). Her research focus is on understanding the genetics of cancer, using a combination of genomic studies, mouse models and comparative oncology approaches. More recently, she has been focusing on comparative oncogenomics, studying spontaneously developed cancer in animals, both as alternative models of human cancer and for the benefit of the animals themselves.
