Dr. Chew Wei Memorial Prize in Cancer Research: Dr. William Foulkes

Dr. William Foulkes is a professor in the Departments of Medicine, Human Genetics and Oncology at McGill University, the Director of the Program in Cancer Genetics in the Departments of Oncology and Human Genetics, and has laboratories at Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research and the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre.

Dr. Foulkes has worked in the area of inherited susceptibility to cancer for over 25 years, transitioning his translational research from cancer gene mutation discovery to clinical applications.

He has made unique contributions and seminal discoveries in cancer genetics, such as describing the phenotype of BRCA1 related breast cancer, which formed the conceptual framework for treating BRCA1 cancers in a different way clinically. His lab discovered and characterized cancer predisposing founder mutations in Montreal populations and identified the relationship of genotype to phenotype in DICER1 Syndrome, which provided molecular diagnoses for multiple childhood cancers. His discovery of mutations in SMARCA4 as the cause of inherited small cell ovarian cancer was also a critical contribution to his field of research.