William D Foulkes

Departments of Human Genetics and Oncology
McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada

William Foulkes MBBS PhD FRCP FRCPC is a clinician-scientist who investigates the causes and consequences of inherited cancers.
He trained in medicine at Barts Hospital in London and completed his training, in cancer genetics, at McGill, where he is presently a James McGill Professor in the Departments of Human Genetics, Medicine and Oncology.

In addition to his contributions to our knowledge of inherited susceptibility to cancer, he has played a major role in translating research findings to the clinic, most extensively on susceptibility to breast, colorectal and ovarian cancer.
In 2005, he established the BRCA symposium, a biennial international symposium on hereditary breast and ovarian cancer, which has become the leading conference in the world on this subject. Recently, he began to investigate rare pediatric cancer susceptibility syndromes, such as that caused by germ-line mutations in the gene called DICER1. He has published over 400 papers, many in leading journals including Nature Genetics, the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA and the Journal of the National Cancer Institute; his work has been cited over 15,000 times.

He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Pathology. In 2010, Dr. Foulkes was made a Scholar of the Susan G. Komen Foundation (US), and in 2013 he was awarded the prestigious O. Harold Warwick Prize for Cancer Control of the Canadian Cancer Society.
He was elected to the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences in 2014.