Dr. Simon Furney is StAR Research Lecturer in Genomic Medicine at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. Having moved abroad to conduct post-doctoral genomics research in world-leading institutes in the UK and Spain, he relocated back to Dublin in 2014 to establish a European Commission funded research programme in Genomic Medicine and Cancer Bioinformatics. He has devoted the last 7 years of his career to using Next Generation Sequencing technologies for the interpretation of cancer genomes, resulting in high-impact first author publications (e.g. Genome Research, 2012; Cancer Discovery, 2013; Nature, 2014) and scientific awards (Irish Association for Cancer Research Senior Young Scientist Award, 2016). Dr. Furney has >15 years experience in genomic data interpretation and has analysed several thousand cancer genomes.

The overarching theme of Dr. Furney’s research programme is the inference of mechanisms of tumour development and evolution from cancer genome data. He has several collaborations with clinicians in which they are using next generation sequencing data from melanoma, breast, lung and colorectal cancer patients to understand tumour development and tumour evolution in response to therapy. In parallel his research includes pan-cancer analyses of thousands of cancer genomes to uncover common and cancer subtype-specific mechanisms of oncogenesis. In addition to BREAST-PREDICT, he is a member of the Genomics England (100,000 Genomes Project) Clinical Interpretation Partnership (GeCIP) and the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health.