Scientific Advisory Board

Prof. Mark Lawler

Queen's University Belfast

Mark is Associate Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Professor of Digital Health, and Chair in Translational Cancer Genomics at Queens University Belfast. He has received numerous awards including the prestigious 2018 European Health Award. He is a member of the Board of the European Alliance for Personalised Medicine and led development of their research strategy. He was architect of the European Cancer Patient’s Bill of Rights, launched in the EU Parliament on World Cancer Day 2014. He led the European Code of Cancer Practice initiative by the European Cancer Organisation which he launched with EU Health Commissioner Stella Kyriakides. He is also Co-chair of their Special Network on COVID-19 and Cancer. Mark is Associate Director of Health Data Research Wales-Northern Ireland and Scientific Director of DATA-CAN, the UK Health Data Research Hub for Cancer. His leadership in health data research, with a particular emphasis on cancer has led to key publications in the premier international journals.

Prof. Manuela Baccarini

University of Vienna

Manuela Baccarini, Professor of Cell Signalling at the Max Perutz Labs of the University of Vienna and the Medical University of Vienna, serves as Vice-Rector for Research and International Affairs since 1 October 2022. Baccarini is interested in signal transduction, in particular the essential biological functions of signalling pathways implicated in developmental diseases and cancer. Prof. Baccarini has published more than 100 scientific papers and is recognized as an expert in her field. She has a keen interest in educating the next generation of scientists, and until September 2022 was the Director of the Vienna BioCenter PhD program – a graduate School of the University and Medical University of Vienna, which comprises more than 80 groups from the University of Vienna, Medical University of Vienna and academic institutes on Campus. Prof. Baccarini has been elected corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation.

Prof. Nils Blüthgen

Charité University Hospital & Humboldt University, Berlin.

Prof. Nils Blüthgen is a computational biologist at the Charité University Hospital and Humboldt University in Berlin. As a trained physicist and biophysicist, he has worked in computational modelling and bioinformatics for more than 15 years. His group in Berlin investigates signalling and gene regulatory networks in cancer and develops both computational and single cell methods to understand response of these networks to treatment in complex patient-derived model systems. He is also speaker of a doctoral training program in computational cancer research, sitting on the steering committee of the multi-omics platform at the Berlin Institute of Health.

Dr. Patrick Forde

Bloomberg-Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, Johns Hopkins Medicine

Dr. Forde treats patients with lung cancer, mesothelioma and other thoracic cancers. He completed training in internal medicine and oncology in Ireland prior to undertaking a further fellowship at Johns Hopkins. He is currently Co-Director of the Division of Upper Aerodigestive Malignancies in the Department of Oncology at Johns Hopkins and Director of the Thoracic Oncology Research Program. He has led development of a clinical-translational research program focused on the immuno-oncology of upper aerodigestive malignancies. Dr. Forde's research examines the role of immunotherapy for earlier stage lung cancer and his work has led to the development of several ongoing phase 3 trials. He leads international phase 2 and 3 clinical trials of novel immunotherapy approaches for lung cancer and mesothelioma that are currently active in Europe, Asia and North America while also serving as principal investigator for the thoracic cancer immunobiology biospecimen repository at Johns Hopkins.

Prof. Frank Gannon

QIMR Berghofer

Prof. Frank Gannon was Director and CEO of QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute 2011-2020 having been Director General and board member of Research Ireland since 2007. His major research interest is the regulation of gene expression by the estrogen receptor. His work has resulted in over 300 publications that have been cited over 20,000 times. In addition, he has been a founder of three start-up companies and a board member or Chair of 7 companies. He is a Fellow, Council member and Chair of the Reports committee of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences, Fellow of the Royal Irish Academy, Academia Europea ,European Academy of Cancer Sciences and Mexican Academy of Medicine. He has been awarded Honorary Doctorates from University of Szeged, University of Queensland, Queens University Belfast and National University of Ireland. Currently he is an Emeritus Fellow at QIMR Berghofer and has Honorary/Adjunct Professor appointments at the University of Queensland.

Prof. Juliet Gray

University of Southampton, UK

Prof. Juliet Gray is a Professor in Paediatric Oncology within Medicine at the University of Southampton. Prof. Gray graduated from Cambridge University and the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine. She completed her clinical training in Paediatric Oncology at Southampton, Great Ormond Street and the Royal Marsden hospitals. During her training she was awarded a Cancer Research UK Clinical Research Fellowship, which allowed her to complete a PhD in cancer immunotherapy within the Cancer Sciences Unit, University of Southampton. In 2006, she was appointed at a NIHR Clinical Lecturer in Paediatric Oncology, and as a Senior Lecturer in Paediatric Oncology in 2010. She is an honorary Consultant in Paediatric Oncology at University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust (UHSFT), where she leads the clinical Paediatric Oncology and Haematology department.

Prof. Markus Morrison

University of Stuttgart

Markus Morrison (Rehm) is the Director of the Institute of Cell Biology and Immunology (IZI) and also is the Director of the Stuttgart Research Center Systems Biology (SRCSB) at the University of Stuttgart, one of the leading technical universities in Germany. The IZI and the SRCSB manage comprehensive research core facilities and research infrastructures for cellular analytics, systems and synthetic biology and coordinate large scale national and international research consortia with academic, clinical and private sector partners. His research team in Cell Biology and Experimental Systems Biology covers expertise in Biochemistry, Biophysics, Molecular Imaging, and Computational Modelling. His group develops and utilizes innovative experimental and mathematical approaches to monitor key processes controlling cell suicide and proliferation signalling in the context of human health and disease.

Prof. Jacqui Shaw

University of Leicester

Prof. Shaw’s research is focused on circulating nucleic acids for early detection and monitoring of breast and lung cancers. In collaboration with Prof. RC Coombes at Imperial College, she leads an integrated programme of clinical and translational research between the two universities funded by a Programme award from Cancer Research UK. Prof. Shaw is internationally renowned for ctDNA profiling expertise. Her lab was the first to depict the tumour and immune system co-evolution through ctDNA for guiding treatment decisions and detecting early-stage cancers through ctDNA in a real-world breast cancer screening setting. She also works with Prof. Charles Swanton as part of the TRACERx major national trial analysing genetic changes in the tumours of non-small cell lung cancer patients from diagnosis and through their treatment trial that provided the first evidence of sub-clonal dynamics and chemotherapy resistance before CT scans through ctDNA.

Prof. Sara Zanivan

MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas

Prof. Sara Zanivan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Experimental Therapeutics, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas. Prior to this, she led the Tumour Microenvironment & Proteomics team and the Proteomics Advanced Technology Facility at the CRUK Scotland Institute in Glasgow. She studied biology at the University of Torino (Italy) and she obtained her PhD degree in System Biology at the Candiolo Cancer Institute, IRCCS, in Candiolo (Italy). She previously worked in Matthias Manns’ group at the Max-Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried (Germany) as a post-doctoral fellow.

Prof. Zanivan’s research focuses on cancer associated fibroblasts (CAFs) and aims to elucidate CAF functions and how the interactions between CAFs, cancer cells and blood vessels contribute to cancer progression and metastasis. Her labs’ overarching goal is to identify ways to exploit CAFs to effectively target tumours. She is also an expert in MS-proteomics and with her team uses and deve

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