Karlene Cimprich is a Professor at Stanford University in the Department of Chemical and Systems Biology. She received her PhD in chemistry from Harvard University and remained at Harvard for her postdoctoral work with Stuart Schreiber where she cloned and began to study the checkpoint kinase, ATR. Her lab is interested in many aspects of genome instability, particularly as they relate to DNA replication. She seeks to understand the impact of replication stress signaling and DNA damage tolerance pathways on genome instability as well as the genome instability resulting from interactions between replication and transcription. Her work has also established the central importance of DNA-RNA hybrids or R-loops as a major endogenous source of replication stress and genome instability. Dr. Cimprich serves on several editorial boards, has organized a number of international meetings and is a recipient of numerous awards. Most recently she has been recognized as an AAAS fellow and an American Cancer Society Research Professor.

Originally from Iaşi, Romania, Dana received her bachelor’s degree in pharmaceutical sciences and a master’s degree in molecular and cellular biology from Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan. For her PhD, she joined the lab of Takemi Enomoto to work on DNA replication and recombination in budding yeast. After a short postdoc with Kunihiro Ohta at the RIKEN laboratory in Wako (Japan), Dana took a position as a staff scientist with Marco Foiani at the Institute FIRC of Molecular Oncology (IFOM) in Milan, Italy. There, she became a junior group leader in 2008 and tenured principal investigator in 2013. From 2019, Dana is also a principal investigator at the Institute of Molecular Genetics (IGM) at CNR in Pavia. Dana was elected a member of EMBO in 2016 and has been the recipient of both a European Research Council (ERC) starting grant and an ERC consolidator grant. Her lab is interested in the mechanistic interplay of DNA damage response and chromosome structure during replication and beyond.