Renu Wadhwa obtained her first PhD from the Guru Nanak Dev University, India, and her second PhD from the University of Tsukuba, Japan. She underwent her post-doctoral training at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, England, and RIKEN, Japan. She has been working in Japan, mostly leading a research team working on the mechanisms of cell proliferation controls at the Biomedical Research Institute, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Tsukuba Science City, Japan. Her major research interest is to understand the molecular mechanisms of aging and cancer using normal and cancer cells as model systems. She first cloned a novel member of the heat shock protein (hsp70) family in 1993 and named it ‘mortalin’. She also cloned CARF (Collaborator of ARF) and demonstrated its impact on DNA damage signaling, yielding two-way control (cellular senescence and malignant transformation) on cell proliferation. She is serving as Prime Senior Researcher in AIST and leader of DBT (Department of Biotechnology, Government of India)-AIST (Japan) International Laboratory for Advanced Biomedicine, Japan (DAILAB) at AIST, Japan. Presently, she is also serving as a Professor at the School of Integrative and Global Majors (SIGMA), University of Tsukuba, Japan; Adjunct Professor, Department of Bioengineering, Hanyang University, Korea and Honorary Scientist, Faculty of Medicine, University of Sydney, Children’s Medical Research Institute, Australia.