After earning her B.Sc. with honors from the University of Melbourne (Australia), Yana Zavros completed her Ph.D. in 1998 in the Department of Surgery. She completed her Howard Hughes Medical Institute postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan. In 2007, Zavros joined Pharmacology and Systems Physiology at the University of Cincinnati as an Assistant Professor. There she pioneered organoid-based technologies aiming to generate patient-derived models to study underlying mechanisms driving initiation and progression of gastrointestinal cancers. In 2019, she moved to the University of Arizona as Professor of Cellular and Molecular Medicine. She is Associate Head of Research and director of the Tissue Acquisition and Cellular/Molecular Analysis Shared Resource.