To facilitate a smooth transition for former Program Co-Leader Zhiyuan Shen into the role of Associate Director for Basic Research, the CCSG and Cancer Center leaders conducted a targeted recruitment of well-established investigators that resulted in recruitment of Dr. Cristina Montagna, PhD, Professor of Radiation Oncology. Montagna became Program Co-Leader in 2022 and has been working closely with Shen and Chan in managing GICG. Montagna is a cancer biologist with strong expertise in molecular cytogenetics and cell biology. Her laboratory has significantly contributed to the field of oncogene discovery and genomic instability in cancer, and the field of age-related tissue degeneration. She also has strong interests in the functional consequences of genomic instability, particularly aneuploidy, on cell fitness. She was the first to report the accumulation of somatic aneuploidy with aging and to demonstrate that aneuploidization in wild type cells causes senescence. Her ongoing projects are centered towards the application of advanced and single cell-based genomic methodologies to study tumor initiation and progression driven by HPV infection and BRCA1 haploinsufficiency, which are supported by NIH R21, RF1, and U54, and two DOD awards. Montagna adds significant strength in cytogenetics and functional genomics to GICG and bridges genomic instability and cancer genomics.