Elizaveta Benevolenskaya, PhD

Elizaveta Benevolenskaya, PhD, is Director of the Cancer Genomics Shared Resource and leader of the Lung Cancer Working Group at the University of Illinois Cancer Center. A Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics at the University of Illinois College of Medicine Chicago, she has been at UIC since 2005. Her lab works to understand epigenetic changes driving cancer progression, with the hope that their work will eventually translate to the clinic to help cancer patients. Epigenetic mechanisms play an important role in determining cell fate. She studies binding of epigenetic factors to genes at the genome scale in collaboration with Nuria Lopez-Bigas, PhD, who leads the Biomedical Genomics Group at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB) in Barcelona, Spain. Through a combination of molecular and bioinformatics approaches, they aim to better understand how epigenetic factors regulate gene expression and function as oncogenes and tumor suppressors. She uses single-cell sequencing to gain insights into the heterogeneous nature and dynamic behavior of tumor cells. In addition, she is experienced with multidimensional genomic data and pipelines to extract functional predictions from large datasets, which can be successfully validated. As part of her leadership roles, she assesses the performance of the UIC genomic cores as their Faculty Director and makes recommendations on strategies for improvement to the Vice Chancellor for Research.