Professor Hilda Pickett is Head of the Telomere Length Regulation Unit at Children’s Medical Institute (CMRI), Sydney, Australia, and Professor in the Faculty of Medicine and Health at the University of Sydney. Her research interests include DNA damage and repair pathways, the molecular mechanisms that underlie telomere length control, and how telomere length dynamics impact genome stability and cellular immortality. She has over twenty years’ experience in telomere research, and has made important contributions to our understanding of the Alternative Lengthening of Telomeres pathway. Professor Pickett obtained her PhD from the Department of Genetics at the University of Leicester, UK, and completed postdoctoral positions at Cancer Research UK, St James’s University Hospital, Leeds, UK, and in the Cancer Research Unit at CMRI, prior to establishing her lab at CMRI.