Elad Ziv is a physician-scientist whose research focuses on germline genetic susceptibility to cancer and treatment outcomes. He and his colleagues have often leveraged concepts from population genetics to help guide their studies of cancer. His group has made important contributions to understanding inherited susceptibility to breast cancer, identifying a variant with a strong protective effect found commonly among Hispanic/Latina women in the US and originating from the Indigenous American population of the Americas. He has also made contributions to our understanding of how the tumor immune microenvironment is shaped by inherited genetic variation, identifying variants that underlie autoimmunity and viral immunity as key determinants of the interferon response in solid tumors.