Professor Alan Ashworth

Professor Ashworth studied for his BSc in Chemistry and Biochemistry at Imperial College, London, before completing his PhD in Biochemistry at University College, London. Since 1986, he has worked in the Chester Beatty Laboratories at the Institute of Cancer Research in London. He was appointed Director of the Breakthrough Research Centre at the end of 1999. The Centre now contains 100 people working on aspects of breast cancer from basic to clinical. Ashworth is an elected member of EMBO and the Academy of Medical Sciences. He contributed to the discovery of the BRCA2 gene in 1995 and his current interests are in developing treatments for cancer in BRCA mutation carriers, and the therapeutic exploitation of DNA repair defects in tumour cells.

Professor Nazneen Rahman

Nazneen Rahman is a Professor of Childhood Cancer Genetics at the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) and a Consultant Clinical Geneticist at the Royal Marsden Hospital and St Georges Hospital. She qualified in medicine at Oxford University in 1991 and undertook her general medical training in London. She obtained a PhD in Molecular Genetics at ICR in 1999 and her Certificate of Completion of Specialist Training in Clinical Genetics in 2001. Her research work has been directed towards the mapping and identification of human disease genes. Together with Professor Mike Stratton, she leads a breast cancer genetic research programme that identified the breast cancer susceptibility allele CHEK2*1100delC in 2002 and is currently searching for other genes that predispose to breast cancer. She also leads a research programme aimed at identifying childhood overgrowth/cancer genes, which recently discovered that BUB1B mutations are a cause of constitutional aneuploidy and childhood cancer.