Michael Stratton
(Professor and Deputy Director, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, UK)
http://www.icr.ac.uk/research/research_profiles/2750.shtml

Michael Stratton is Deputy Director of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, where he is Head of the Cancer Genome Project, and is Professor of Cancer Genetics at the Institute of Cancer Research. He qualified in medicine at Oxford University and Guys Hospital, trained as a histopathologist at the Hammersmith and Maudsley Hospitals and obtained a PhD in the molecular biology of cancer at the Institute of Cancer Research. His research interests have been in the genetics of cancer. He led the group that mapped and identified the high risk breast cancer susceptibility gene, BRCA2. More recently he has found moderate risk breast cancer susceptibility genes such as CHEK2, ATM, BRIPand PALB2as well as genes for skin, testis, colorectal, thyroid, and childhood cancers. At the Cancer Genome Project he conducts high throughput, systematic genome-wide searches for somatic mutations in human cancer in order to identify new cancer genes, to understand processes of mutagenesis in human cancers and to reveal the role of genome structure in determining abnormalities of cancer genomes. These studies have led to the discovery of activating somatic mutations in the BRAFand ERBB2genes in melanoma and lung cancer respectively and have described basic patterns of somatic mutation in cancer genomes. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2008.