Dr. Heather Christofk is Associate Director of Basic and Translational Research at the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center.  She is a Professor of Biological Chemistry at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and Co-Director of the UCLA Metabolomics Center. Dr. Christofk earned a B.S. at UCLA and a Ph.D. at Harvard.  Her research focuses on the role of metabolism in cancer, virus infection, and differentiation, with the goal of using this knowledge to develop novel treatment strategies.  She is a Searle Scholar and recipient of the Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovation Award from the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation, the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, and an American Cancer Society Research Scholar Award.  Along with Drs. Bill Lowry and Mike Jung at UCLA, Dr. Christofk is a co-founder of Pelage Pharmaceuticals, a company developing new drugs to treat baldness that activate hair follicle stem cells by changing their metabolism.  Dr. Christofk serves on the Editorial/Advisory Boards of several journals including Cell, Cell Metabolism, Cancer Discovery and PLOS Biology.