Dr. Vertino is a cancer research scientist and educator known for her work in the field of cancer epigenetics. Her laboratory is focused on understanding the epigenetic mechanisms underlying altered gene expression programs and how they contribute to the trajectory of human breast and other cancers, and to exploit these mechanisms as a therapeutic approach to “re-program” the cancer epigenome. She has worked translationally with clinicians, population scientists, and computational scientists to leverage epigenomic analyses and machine learning approaches to define genomic/epigenomic ‘signatures’ associated with cancer outcomes and environmental exposures. Recent work seeks to define how the loss of epigenetically enforced transcriptional constraints contributes to tumor cell plasticity and adaptation to drive the emergence of invasive or drug resistant variants.