Daniel Durocher is the Tom Kierans Research Chair in Mechanisms of Cancer Development at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Medical Genetics at the University of Toronto, Canada. After completing his PhD at McGill University in Montreal, Dan was a postdoctoral scientist in the laboratory of Professor Steve Jackson at the University of Cambridge, before starting his own lab in Toronto. Dan also holds a Canada Research Chair in Proteomics, Bioinformatics and Functional Genomics, and he has received several prestigious awards including the 2006 Canadian Institutes of Health New Principal Investigator Award, the 2009 Lloyd Fogler Award of Excellence, and he was named “One of Canada’s Top 40 under 40” in 2010. Despite his relatively early career stage, Dan has already made numerous seminal contributions on the role of protein phosphorylation and protein ubiquitinatinylation in DNA damage responses that prevent the onset of cancer. His key discoveries include the molecular mechanism by which RNF8 directs the key breast cancer protein BRCA1 to sites of DNA damage, and the identification of mutations in the related RNF168 gene as the cause of RIDDLE syndrome involving immunodeficiency, developmental defects and radiation hypersensitivity.