Samra Turajlic completed her undergraduate medical studies at Oxford University and clinical training at UCL. She completed specialist training in medical oncology in 2015 and was appointed a Consultant Medical Oncologist at the Royal Marsden sub-specialising in the treatment of melanoma and kidney cancer. She gained a PhD in 2013 from the Institute of Cancer Research in the field of melanoma genetics and targeted therapy resistance.  In 2014, she was awarded a Cancer Research UK Clinician Scientist Fellowship to study cancer evolution at the CRUK London Research Institute. She became an independent Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute in 2019 and divides her time between the clinic and her lab. Samra Turajlic is the Chief Investigator of translational studies into melanoma and kidney cancer, and her goal is to develop an evolutionary understanding of cancer through interdisciplinary research for patient benefit, including therapy and methods development. She is Faculty Lead for Basic and Translational Research of the European Society of Medical Oncology (ESMO), and Faculty member for Immunotherapy. She is the lead of the 100K Genomes Project Partnership for Melanoma. She is on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Institute Jules Bourdet (Brussels), Systems Biology Ireland Institute, and Genomics England (UK). She is a member of the WHO pathology working group, NCRI Bladder and Renal Cancer Clinical Studies Group, Uveal Melanoma Guidelines Group, ESMO Faculty member for genitourinary cancers. She is a Trustee of patient advocacy groups, Kidney Cancer Support Network and Melanoma Focus and a Senior Editor at Macmillan Cancer Support. She receives research funding from Melanoma Research Alliance, National Institute for Health, and Department of Defence (all US), and CRUK, Rosetrees Trust, the Royal Marsden Cancer Charity, the RMH/ICR Biomedical Research Centre (all UK), as well as industry support from Roche and BMS. In 2022 she was awarded the ESMO Translational Research Award for the work impacting cancer science and translational medicine, including her wok on cancer and COVID-19. The same year she was awarded the BBA Rising Star Award. In 2018 she was named in “50 Movers and Shakers in Bio-business” (50 women in the UK who are challenging the status quo to bring better health to people). Her work has been cited 11,000 times and she is a co-inventor on three patents arising form her research discoveries.