Dr. Verónica Rendo

Biography

Verónica Rendo studied Biology at Simón Bolívar University in Venezuela. In 2013, she moved to Sweden to pursue a PhD at Uppsala University. During her PhD, she worked under the mentorship of Professor Tobias Sjoblom, focusing on genomic losses in cancer that could be exploited for therapy. In 2019, Verónica relocated to Boston to pursue a postdoc in Dr. Rameen Beroukhim’s lab at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, which is affiliated with Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. She concentrated on the mechanisms of response and resistance associated with p53 reactivation in malignant brain tumors while continuing her work on aneuploidy. She described a new class of therapeutic targets known as 'toxic genes,' which are genes with genomic amplifications negatively selected in cancer evolution and whose high levels of expression are detrimental to cancer cell fitness. In 2025, Verónica became the Group Leader in Neuro-Oncology at the Department of Immunology, Genetics, and Pathology at Uppsala University, combining descriptive and functional genomic approaches to understand brain tumor evolution and treatment resistance. This position is funded by the Swedish Cancer Foundation Beijer Laboratory for gene neurological science. In March, she was awarded the Junior Investigator Award by the Cancer Society, providing funding for a six-year research position, and she recently presented her work at the world's largest neuro-oncology conference.

Research Interests

Experience