Clare Turnbull is Professor of Translational Cancer Genetics in the Division of Genetics and Epidemiology at the Institute of Cancer Research. Having trained as a Clinical Geneticist, her clinical work at The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust focuses on management of patients and families with genetic susceptibility to cancer. From 2014 to 2020, Clare worked at Genomics England as Clinical Lead for Cancer Genomics for the 100,000 Genomes Project. 

Much of her research focuses on statistical, population and public-health-related analyses to better implement cancer susceptibility genetics for risk stratification, cancer early diagnosis and prevention. She has had an honorary appointment at NHS Digital in the National Disease Registration Service (NDRS) for the last 7 years, leading on national amalgamation and analyses of variant data from all NHS diagnostic labs in England, supported by a multicentre CRUK-funded Catalyst Award: ‘CanGene-CanVar’. She also leads a number of NHS genomics transformation initiatives: BRCA-DIRECT was initially a CRUK-funded programme piloting digital delivery of BRCA-testing in breast cancer patients and now being adapted with NHS England as standard-of-care (i) in unselected women with breast cancer across North London and (ii) as a national community-based programme of testing in the Jewish population.   She has just initiated a new CRUK-funded programme ‘CG-MAVE’, with Dave Adams (Sanger) and Greg Findlay (Crick), focused on development of massive functional assays to better understand variant pathogenicity in cancer susceptibility genes.

Clare studied undergraduate medicine at Cambridge, clinical medicine at Oxford, undertook a Masters in epidemiology and statistics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a PhD in statistical genetics at The Institute of Cancer Research.