Associate Professor Clare Stirzaker

A/Prof Stirzaker is Group Leader of the Epigenetic Deregulation in Cancer group at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, Sydney and Conjoint Associate Professor at the School of Clinical Medicine, UNSW Medicine and Health. She graduated with a PhD in Molecular Biology at Macquarie University before embarking on her postdoctoral studies at RPA, Sydney. She joined the Garvan Institute where she established her own group in 2014, focussed on understanding epigenetic deregulation in cancer.

Throughout her long-standing research career A/Prof Stirzaker has made significant contributions to the development of important technological and methodological techniques that have successfully underpinned many groundbreaking discoveries from the group. Foremost among these are her contributions to the development of bisulphite sequencing, that has become the ‘gold standard’ for the field in interrogating DNA methylation profiles (Methods 2002; Nat Prot 2006), and enabled seminal discoveries in epigenetic deregulation in cancer (Cancer Research 2004 1^st author; Nat Genetics 2006; Nat Cell Biol 2010 1^st co-author; Cancer Cell 2013, 2019, co-senior, Nat Struct Biol 2024). Her technical expertise is evident from her highly cited first/senior manuscripts in well-regarded journals (Epigenetics 2011; Genome Research 2012; Genome Biol 2016; Methods Mol Biol 2018; Clin Epigenetics 2020, 2021). Her co-senior /first author papers in Cancer Cell, 2019, Nat Struct 2024 and Mol Cancer 2025 highlight her leadership in the field.

A/Prof Stirzaker also has considerable experience in biomarker development, leading a national collaboration which culminated in a 1st author publication in Nature Comms 2015, and led to a provisional Australian patent (named inventor) for DNA methylation as a clinical biomarker.  Recently, A/Prof Stirzaker  has shown the potential utility of DNA methylation as a biomarker in Phyllodes Tumours of the breast (Journal Pathol  2024 co-first). A/Prof Stirzaker’s current research is focused on developing prognostic and predictive DNA methylation biomarkers in breast cancer, with a focus on  developing DNA methylation biomarkers for liquid biopsy monitoring of breast cancer.

‍