Rate My Professor Heather Cunliffe

Associate Professor Heather Cunliffe holds a position in the Department of Pathology and Molecular Medicine within the Dunedin School of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, at the University of Otago. She completed her undergraduate training at Victoria University of Wellington and obtained her BSc(Hons) and PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Otago. Following her doctoral studies, Cunliffe pursued postdoctoral training as a Fellow in the Cancer Genetics Branch at the National Human Genome Research Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, USA, from 1999 to 2004. She then advanced to research faculty at the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) in Phoenix, Arizona, where she led the Breast and Ovarian Cancer Research Unit for a decade before returning to the University of Otago in 2014.

Cunliffe heads the Molecular Oncology Group and specializes in translational research aimed at biomarker discovery for breast and ovarian cancers. Her academic interests encompass defining drivers of metastasis in triple negative breast cancer, elucidating molecular mechanisms in inflammatory breast cancer, identifying therapeutic targets in rare ovarian tumors, investigating chemoresistance in epithelial ovarian cancer, and advancing biospecimen science for genomics-enabled medicine. She employs genomic, biochemical, and cell biologic approaches to address pathobiology in treatment-refractory tumors. Recognized for her contributions, she holds Honorary Lifetime Membership on the Board of Directors of the Anne Rita Monahan Foundation and was a Founding Board Member of the Ovarian Cancer Alliance of Arizona. Cunliffe serves as Specialty Chief Editor for Frontiers in Cancer Genetics and participates on the Health Research South Board, Australia New Zealand Gynaecological Oncology Group, and is an active member of the American Association for Cancer Research and Women in Cancer Research. Her key publications include "Stable overexpression of the epithelial sodium channel alpha subunit reduces migration and proliferation in breast cancer cells" by McQueen et al. (2025, Breast Cancer Research & Treatment), "365 days of progress in cancer genetics" by Ratajska, Sette, and Cunliffe (2023, Frontiers in Oncology), and contributions to studies on low-grade serous ovarian cancer patient voices (Sun et al., 2024, Gynecologic Oncology). She also teaches courses such as PATH 302 Cancer Biology, for which she is convenor, and others in genetics and pathology.