Dr Joanna Achinger-Kawecka is a laboratory head of the 3D Chromatin Organisation Lab at the South Australian immunoGENomics Cancer Institute (SAiGENCI), University of Adelaide. Joanna completed her PhD in 2014 in cancer epigenetics, supported by the prestigious Marie Curie Fellowship at the University of Tuebingen, Germany. She then joined Professor Susan Clark’s Laboratory at the Garvan Institute in Sydney as a postdoctoral fellow, where she made pioneering contributions to the study of the 3D genome and epigenome in cancer. In 2024, she was recruited to the University of Adelaide, where she established her independent research lab at SAiGENCI. Her lab integrates experimental and bioinformatics approaches to study the principles of 3D genome folding and gene deregulation in cancer. A key focus of the team’s research is understanding the regulatory potential of transposable elements in the cancer genome, with an ultimate goal of exploiting these changes in new cancer therapeutic strategies.