Dr Doug Easton
Institute of Public Health
University of Cambridge
Cambridge

Professor Doug Easton is a Principal Research Fellow of Cancer Research UK and Director of the Cancer Research UK Genetic Epidemiology Unit, University of Cambridge. He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2002. A member of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) guideline development group on familial breast cancer, he also sits on the steering committee of the Breast Cancer Information Core (BIC) and the Advisory Committee to the NIH Cancer Family Registry (CFRBCS).

He is world-renowned for his research into genes that affect our risk of common cancers, particularly breast cancer. In the 1990s, Professor Easton's team helped track down two genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2, which strongly influence breast cancer risk. His team also works on ovarian and prostate cancer, and melanoma. Their findings will help identify high-risk individuals and could lead to new ways of preventing, diagnosing and treating the disease in the future.

His principal research interests are in genetic epidemiology of common diseases, especially cancer and his major research contributions have been in design and analysis of large-scale epidemiological studies, and in the development of original statistical methodology.

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