Associate Professor Joan Heath recently moved her laboratory to the Development and Cancer Division of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research. Prior to this she was co-head of the Colon Molecular and Cell Biology Laboratory at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research from 1998-2012. During this period she adopted the zebrafish as a vertebrate model in which to discover genes with functions in intestinal development that may also be critical for the development of colon cancer. Her laboratory’s positional cloning of the underlying genes in several zebrafish intestinal mutants has drawn attention to a group of “information-processing” genes (transcription factors, rRNA processing genes, mRNA splicing genes, nuclear pore components) that are essential for the growth and proliferation of intestinal epithelial cells. Her current goal is to determine whether these genes contribute to tumorigenesis using zebrafish cancer models, loss-of-function mouse models and analysis of human cancer transcriptomes.