Elizabeth Murchison is Professor of Comparative Oncology and Genetics at the University of Cambridge, Department of Veterinary Medicine. Her laboratory, the Transmissible Cancer Group, studies the genetics, immunology and evolution of clonally transmissible cancers in dogs and Tasmanian devils.

Elizabeth grew up in Tasmania, where she loved to catch glimpses of the island’s unique wildlife during hikes in the rugged wilderness. She obtained her undergraduate degree from the University of Melbourne in 2002, and performed doctoral research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York, graduating in 2007. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, where she sequenced the genome of the Tasmanian devil and its transmissible cancer, she opened her group at the University of Cambridge in 2013.

The Transmissible Cancer Group is supported by competitive grants from Wellcome, the European Molecular Biology Organisation, UK Research and Innovation, the Leverhulme Trust and the Save the Tasmanian Devil Appeal. Elizabeth has been the recipient of several awards, notably the Philip Leverhulme Prize (2014) and the Cancer Research UK Future Leaders in Cancer Research Award (2014). She is a Professorial Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge. She is a keen science communicator and in and in 2011 she delivered a TED talk entitled “Fighting a Contagious Cancer” which has been translated into 29 languages and viewed by a global audience more than 500,000 times.