Associate Professor Gemma Kelly is a Laboratory Head within the Blood Cells and Blood Cancer Division at WEHI and an NHMRC Leadership Fellow. Originally from the UK, she did her undergraduate studies at Durham University, followed by a PhD investigating virus-associated cancers at the Cancer Research UK (CRUK) Institute at The University of Birmingham. She relocated to Australia in 2009 following the award of a Kay Kendall Leukemia Fund Fellowship. In 2019 she started her own lab in the Blood Cells and Blood Cancer Division at WEHI, headed by Andreas Strasser. Gemma’s team are focused on the interrogation and manipulation of the intrinsic apoptotic pathway for blood cancer therapy. Her team have made significant contributions to identifying resistance factors to drugs called BH3-mimetics that directly induce apoptosis using CRISPR screening approaches. Their research has recently focused on understanding deregulation of the p53 tumour suppressor pathways in therapy resistant cancers and they have identified new therapeutic avenues to boost the efficacy of BH3-mimetic drugs for therapy of aggressive blood cancers. Additionally, the team have in recent years generated a number of sophisticated pre-clinical models to better understand p53 tumour suppressor responses and the role of mutant p53 in cancer growth and susceptibility to therapy.