Prof. Mark Dawson is a Consultant Haematologist, Head of the Haematology Cancer Therapeutics Program and Head of the Cancer Epigenetics Laboratory. He is internationally recognized as a leading clinician-scientist in the field of epigenetics and haematopoiesis. After completing his clinical training in Melbourne, Australia he was awarded the prestigious General Sir John Monash Fellowship and Cambridge Commonwealth Trust Fellowship, which he used to complete his PhD at the University of Cambridge. During his PhD, he described a novel epigenetic signalling pathway which helped pioneer our understanding of how signalling enzymes can influence gene expression by directly modifying chromatin.

Following his PhD, he was awarded the inaugural and highly prestigous Wellcome Trust Beit Prize Fellowship. He used this fellowship to establish his current research program investigating epigenetic regulation of leukaemia stem cells. This research identified a novel therapeutic paradigm for acute myeloid leukaemia by targeting the BET bromodomain proteins that function as epigenetic readers. This research helped set the platform for early stage clinical trials, which have now commenced around the world.

He is regularly invited as a leader in the field to deliver national and international seminars on his research. The research from his laboratory has been published in the premier scientific and clinical journals including Nature, Cell, Science and the New England Journal of Medicine. He is the Senior Fellow for the Leukaemia Foundation Australia and a VESKI innovation fellow. He is also currently Professor of Medicine in Sir Peter MacCallum Department of Oncology and the Centre for Cancer Research at the University of Melbourne.