Bárbara de la Peña Avalos

Dr Bárbara de la Peña Avalos is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Biochemistry and Structural Biology Department at the University of Texas Health in San Antonio, Texas. She received her B.S. in Biochemistry and Microbiology from Universidad del Valle, Guatemala and a M.Sc. in Molecular and Cell/Cellular Biology from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain where she worked on the characterization of ERAS, a putative novel human oncogene, in skin and breast.

She then moved to Australia, as the recipient of a prestigious trainee award by the Princess Alexandra Research Foundation. There, she pursued a Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences with Dr Eloïse Dray, and became conversant with Molecular Biology, microscopy techniques and mice models. During her Ph.D., Bárbara studied a novel protein phosphatase and its role in preventing genomic instability and breast cancer development. She graduated in 2019 from Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia.

In 2019, she joined the lab of Dr Patrick Sung, where she is currently focusing her research efforts in studying new breast cancer genes, to decipher their function in DNA damage repair, genomic stability maintenance and carcinogenesis.