Jean-Yves Masson is an internationally recognized expert in DNA repair mechanisms. His interest in DNA repair began during his PhD where he studied the function of base excision repair enzymes. He then completed his postdoctoral studies at Clare Hall laboratories to study DNA repair by homologous recombination using biochemical and cellular approaches. He was recruited at the Laval University Cancer Center in 2002 and became in 2013 the director of the Molecular Biology, Medical Biochemistry, and Pathology Department. He has over 140  publications in several high-impact journals such as Science, Nature Communications, and Molecular Cell. He is an Editor of Nucleic Acids Research, NAR cancer, Scientific reports, and Biology direct and currently holds a Tier I Canada research chair in DNA repair and cancer therapeutics. Throughout his career, Dr. Masson focused on radiation and chemicals that impede DNA replication to induce DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs). Failure to remove these breaks leads to cell death, genetic mutations, gross chromosome rearrangements, and to cell transformation and cancer. He is one of the few world experts on PALB2, a protein which is getting scientific and public attention as PALB2 mutations increase breast cancer by 6-8 fold. He established that PALB2 deficient cells are very sensitive to PARP inhibitors, a very promising therapeutic avenue for breast/ovarian cancer.  Dr. Masson was recently inducted as a Canadian Academy of Health Sciences fellow.