Meet our International Speakers for both events

Deputy Clinical Director , The Francis Crick Institute, London

Professor Charles Swanton FRCP BSc PhD is a clinician scientist, focusing his work on understanding the challenges inherent in the management of metastatic cancer and their drug resistant and incurable nature. 

Charles completed his PhD in 1998 at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratories on the UCL MBPhD programme before completing his medical oncology and Cancer Research UK (CRUK) funded postdoctoral clinician scientist training in 2008.

He was appointed CRUK senior clinical research fellow and Group Leader of the Translational Cancer Therapeutics laboratory at the London Research Institute (now part of the Francis Crick Institute) and consultant medical oncologist at the Royal Marsden Hospital in 2008. Charles was appointed Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, Chair in Personalised Cancer Medicine at the UCL Cancer Institute and Consultant Thoracic Medical Oncologist at UCL Hospitals in 2011.

Charles is the Chief Investigator of the CRUK TRACERx clinical study to decipher lung cancer evolution and is co-director of the CRUK Lung Cancer Centre of Excellence.

Charles has published over 210 papers, with first or senior author publications in the New England Journal of Medicine, Nature, Nature Genetics, Cancer Discovery, Cancer Cell, Science and the Lancet Oncology. His work has led to insight into genomic diversity within cancers (intratumour heterogeneity) and molecular mechanisms driving cancer branched evolution.

His multidisciplinary team has discovered that HLA loss of heterozygosity, cancer cytotoxics, DNA replication stress, cancer genome doubling events and the APOBEC3B cytidine deaminase precipitate cancer diversity, accelerating cancer evolution, providing the substrate for cancer drug resistance and treatment failure.

Charles was appointed Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2015. Charles was awarded the Stand up to Cancer Translational Cancer Research Prize (2015), Glaxo Smithkline Biochemical Society Prize (2016), San Salvatore prize for Cancer Research (2017) and the Ellison-Cliffe Medal, Royal Society of Medicine (2017). Charles was appointed Napier Professor in Cancer by the Royal Society in 2016. Charles was elected EMBO member and was appointed the Cancer Research UK Chief Clinician in 2017 and was awarded the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Centre Kraft Prize for Excellence in Cancer Research in 2018.

Dr. Matthew B. Yurgelun, MD, FASCO, CGAF
Physician | Director, Lynch Syndrome Center | Senior Physician, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Dr. Matthew B. Yurgelun is a leading physician specialising in gastrointestinal cancer and hereditary cancer syndromes. He is the Director of the Lynch Syndrome Center and the Director of Clinical Research at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Center for Cancer Genetics & Prevention. As an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Yurgelun focuses on the genetic testing and management of hereditary cancers, particularly familial adenomatous polyposis, Lynch syndrome, and hereditary pancreatic cancer.

His clinical expertise covers a wide range of gastrointestinal cancers, including colon, rectal, liver, pancreatic, and stomach cancer. Dr. Yurgelun is board-certified in medical oncology and completed his fellowship and residency at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He earned his MD from Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons.

Dr. Yurgelun has received numerous accolades, including the 2022 Dana-Farber Cancer Institute George P. Canellos, MD Award and recognition as a Fellow of the Collaborative Group of the Americas on Inherited Gastrointestinal Cancer (CGAF) and the American Society of Clinical Oncology (FASCO).

Scientist, Biostatistics Unit | Associate Professor, CING Postgraduate School, Cyprus Institute of Neurology and Genetics

Dr. Kyriaki Michailidou is a statistical genetic epidemiologist with extensive expertise in analysing large genetic and genomic datasets. She currently serves as an Associate Scientist in the Biostatistics Unit at the Cyprus Institute of Neurology and Genetics. Dr. Michailidou earned her PhD in Genetic Epidemiology from the University of Cambridge, UK, and has a background in applied statistics from the University of Oxford.

Her research focuses on statistical genetics, genetic susceptibility to breast cancer, fine mapping, polygenic risk scores, and the classification of variants of uncertain clinical significance (VUS). Dr. Michailidou has been a key contributor to major consortia, including the Breast Cancer Association Consortium (BCAC), the Consortium of Investigators of Modifiers of BRCA1/2 (CIMBA), and ENIGMA. She has co-authored over 100 publications in high-impact journals such as Nature, Nature Genetics, and Cancer Discovery.

Her current projects include the development of polygenic risk scores, fine-mapping analyses, and statistical bioinformatics for Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) data.

Associate Professor / Senior Research Associate, Department of Psychology / Public Health and Primary Care

Dr. Stephanie Archer is an Associate Professor and Senior Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, where she is affiliated with the Departments of Psychology and Public Health and Primary Care. Her research focuses on designing, developing, and implementing multifactorial cancer risk prediction tools in clinical settings, exploring patient and staff experiences of health and social care, and developing and testing digital health interventions.

Dr. Archer's teaching interests include health psychology, health services research, qualitative methods, and the design and testing of health interventions. She holds a BSc, MSc, and PhD, and is committed to improving healthcare delivery through evidence-based interventions.

In addition to her academic work, Dr. Archer enjoys walking, reading, exercising, and spending time with her two children, Lorcán and Oisín. You can contact her via email at saa71@medschl.cam.ac.uk.

Katianne Howard Sharp, PhD, is an Assistant Member in the Department of Psychology and Biobehavioral Sciences at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital (USA). She completed her doctorate in Clinical Psychology with a focus on children and families at The University of Memphis. She completed clinical internship at The University of Mississippi Medical Center Consortium and a research fellowship in pediatric psychology at Nationwide Children’s Hospital. Dr. Howard Sharp joined the Department of Psychology and Biobehavioral Sciences at St. Jude in 2018 as a Clinician-Scientist, with research and clinical interests centered on children’s genetic predisposition to cancer. Dr. Howard Sharp’s research focuses on parent and child adjustment and communication in the context of cancer predisposition identified during childhood. Specifically, her research seeks to understand how children and their parents understand and adapt to children’s genetic testing results and associated cancer risk management.  Dr. Howard Sharp is currently supported by an American Cancer Society Clinician Scientist Development Grant to study parent-child communication about the child’s genetic cancer risk and identify barriers and facilitators of parent-child communication. Through this research Dr. Howard Sharp seeks to promote quality of life, surveillance adherence, and risk reducing health behavior change in children, adolescents and young adults with genetic risk for cancer; as well as develop interventions to support emotional wellbeing children with genetic risk and their parents.