Elizabeth Iorns

Iorns was born in Melbourne, Australia, and was primarily raised in Hawkes Bay, New Zealand. She holds a first-class honors degree in Biomedical Science from the University of Auckland and a Ph.D. in Cancer Biology from The Institute of Cancer Research, a constituent college of the University of London. She was supervised by Alan Ashworth and her thesis was titled High throughput functional analysis for the identification of breast cancer targets.

Iorns completed a postdoctoral research Fellowship at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. In 2008 she received the Young Investigator Award from the Expedition Inspiration Fund for Breast Cancer Research for her work characterizing Breast Stem Cells for the Identification of Cancer Stem Cell Specific Therapeutic Targets. In 2010, Iorns was promoted to Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.

Iorns' research focuses on identifying mechanisms of breast cancer development and progression. She has several high impact publications in the field.

Iorns has been a longtime spokesperson on the issue of reproducibility in academic research. In August 2012 she helped launch the Reproducibility Initiative, a program developed to assist researchers in validating their findings by repeating their experiments through independent laboratories.