Federico Gaiti earned his PhD in evolutionary biology and genomics from the University of Queensland (Australia), where he focused on understanding the evolutionary origin of two major players in human gene regulation: long non-coding RNAs and chromatin marks. Through these studies, he developed a deep interest in understanding how a single normal cell becomes malignant by the accumulation of genetic and non-genetic alterations. This motivated him to pursue a career in biomedical research, to understand the underpinnings of evolutionary plasticity of cancer. As a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Dan Landau’s laboratory at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York Genome Center, he made contributions to the cancer genomics and computational oncology fields by examining the epigenetic dimension of cancer evolution, using chronic lymphocytic leukemia and human gliomas as models. Federico is now developing and applying computational and experimental single-cell genomics and epigenomics methodologies to answer the fundamental question of how malignant cellular states in cancer are jointly determined by genetic and epigenetic alterations. Federico is committed to a career in basic cancer research with translational impact, making discoveries that would offer improved therapeutic options to directly address cancer evolution.