Professor Francesca Ciccarelli is a Professor of Cancer Genomics within the Comprehensive Cancer Centre. She graduated in Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of Bologna and received a PhD in Natural Sciences from the University of Heidelberg. She worked under the supervision of Peer Bork at the EMBL where she studied the evolution of genomes using comparative genomics and phylogenetics.

In 2005, Francesca started her own group at the European Institute of Oncology in Milan. In 2014, she moved to King’s College London and since 2017 her group is seconded to the Francis Crick Institute in London. She is theme co-lead of the Cancer Research UK KHP Centre and of the City of London Major Centre. Francesca works with a multidisciplinary team of biologists, mathematicians, oncologists, engineers and computer scientists who apply molecular genetics, data analysis and theoretical modelling to study cancer biology.