Francisco (Pancho) Barriga was born in Washington DC and grew up in Chile, where he got his biochemistry degree in the Pontificia Universidad Católica. For his PhD, he joined the laboratory of Dr. Eduard Batlle at IRB Barcelona, where he worked on stem cell heterogeneity and identified that the gene Mex3a defines a chemo-resistant population of intestinal stem cells. He then did a postdoc in the laboratory of Dr. Scott Lowe at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where he focused on understanding the biology of copy number alterations in cancer. There he developed new genome engineering approaches and studied the role of chromosome 9p21.3 on cell intrinsic and extrinsic tumor suppression.He recently opened his independent group, where he leads the Cancer Genome Engineering lab at the Vall D´Hebron Institute for Oncology (VHIO). His group focuses on theinterplay of cancer genetics with immunity, tumor heterogeneity, and therapy response.