Clare Turnbull

Clare is Professor of Translational Cancer Genetics in the Division of Genetics and Epidemiology at the Institute of Cancer Research, London and an NHS consultant in Clinical Cancer Genetics at The Royal Marsden.  Her research focuses on statistical, population and public-health-related analyses to inform clinical implementation of cancer susceptibility genetics. Research areas include (i) discovery of novel genes/genomic variants associated with cancer susceptibility (iii) Clinical interpretation of variant pathogenicity (iii) assembly, linkage and longitudinal analyses of routine NHS datasets, including working with NDRS to achieve nationally comprehensive submissions of genetic data from NHS genomic laboratory hubs (iv) evaluation of the clinical utility and impact of genomic risk stratification for cancer early detection and prevention.  A key area of focus over the last five years has been working in partnership with CRUK and NHS England Cancer Programme on development of pragmatic, high-throughput pathways for scaling of NHS genomic testing, focusing first on the BRCA genes (including the BRCA-DIRECT North Thames mainstreaming programme, the national NHS Jewish Community BRCA testing programme and the national NHS Retrospective BRCA-testing programme).

Clare studied undergraduate medicine at Cambridge, clinical medicine at Oxford, undertook a Masters in Epidemiology and Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a PhD in statistical genetics at The Institute of Cancer Research. From 2015 to 2020, Clare worked at Genomics England as Clinical Lead for delivery of the Cancer Genomics element for the 100,000 Genomes Project.