AICR Leadership

Lord John Krebs is Emeritus Professor of Zoology in the University of Oxford. His research area is behavioural ecology and he has published more than 300 research papers, reviews, articles and books.

Lord Krebs completed his undergraduate degree in Zoology (1966) and his DPhil (1970) at Pembroke College, Oxford. After a year as a Departmental Demonstrator in Ornithology at Oxford, he moved to the University of British Columbia as an Assistant Professor of Ecology (1970–73).

He spent a period at the University College of North Wales in Bangor as lecturer in Zoology (1973–75) before returning to Oxford as University Lecturer in Zoology in the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology. Between 1988 and 2005, he was a Royal Society Research Professor at Oxford.

Lord Krebs was Chief Executive of the UK Natural Environment Research Council from 1994 to 1999 and founding Chairman of the UK Food Standards Agency from 2000 to 2005. In 2005, he gave the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures. From 2005–15 he served as Principal of Jesus College, Oxford.

He was appointed to the House of Lords in 2007, as an independent cross-bencher, served as Chairman of the House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee from 2010 to 2014, and was a member of the Energy and Environment Select Committee from 2015–19.

In 2019–20 he chaired a Select Committee inquiry on Food, Poverty, Health and the Environment.  He currently sits on the Science and Technology Select Committee.

He was President of the British Science Association in 2012–13. Between 2009 and 2017 he was a member of the UK Climate Change Committee and chaired its Adaptation Sub-Committee.

Lord Krebs is a scientific adviser to Marks & Spencer and Drax, and Chairman of Oxford Risk, a fintech spinout of Oxford University.

Lord Krebs has received many awards and honours, including a knighthood for services to science, 17 honorary degrees, Fellowship of the Royal Society, the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the US Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina).

Matty Weijenberg is a professor of Molecular Epidemiology of Cancer and the chair of the department of Epidemiology at Maastricht University (UM). Her research is part of the programme Prevention of the GROW Research Institute for Oncology and Reproduction at UM. She is the principal investigator of the Energy for life after ColoRectal cancer study (the EnCoRe study), a prospective cohort study focused on investigating the importance of lifestyle factors (diet, nutrition, physical (in)activity and body composition) for the prognosis and quality of life of people living with and beyond colorectal cancer. There is a special interest in fatigue, chemotherapy induced peripheral neuropathy (CIPN) and sleep. EnCoRe is also part of international consortia of colorectal cancer survivorship studies. One is on biomarkers related to FOlate-dependent one-carbon metabolism in Colorectal cancer recUrrence and Survival (FOCUS). The other is the METABOlic profiles across the Continuum of Colorectal Cancer consortium (MetaboCCC).

Within the nationwide prospective Netherlands Cohort Study on diet and cancer (NLCS), Matty Weijenberg is also involved in research on the importance of lifestyle factors in relation to the incidence and prognosis of colorectal cancer while accounting for (epi)genetic tumour heterogeneity and genetic variation. Matty is a member of the Working group on Lifestyle for the development of the 5th Edition of the European Code Against Cancer within the broader framework of the World Code Against Cancer, launched by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and the World Health Organization (WHO).

Monica L. Baskin, PhD is a Professor of Hematology, Oncology and Palliative Care and Associate Dean for Cancer Innovation in the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine and Deputy Director, Research at the Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Prof Baskin is a licensed psychologist whose research focuses on advancing health equity related to cancer, obesity and other chronic diseases. Her research utilizes community-engaged methods to better understand and address individual, family, and environmental factors associated with the prevention and control of disease.

Professor Rajiv Chowdhury is a medically trained global NCD epidemiologist. He currently works as chair of Global Health at the Robert Stempel College of Public Health at Florida International University. Before embarking on his US-based role, Professor Chowdhury worked at the University of Cambridge and University of Exeter in the UK, as a reader and professor in Global Health, respectively. At Cambridge, between 2008 and 2020, Rajiv co-established, as a founding PI, several pioneering NCD cohort studies in South/East Asia and served as the Scientific Director of a UKRI-funded £8.4M global NCD research program in South Asia (CAPABLE). Rajiv currently serves as a country expert in the Global Burden of Disease initiative. In addition, he maintains adjunct roles as a professor at the University of Bern in Switzerland and Executive Director at the South Asian Centre for Non-Communicable Disease Research in Bangladesh.

Rajiv’s research interests focus on investigating how environmental, societal and biological factors may influence the risks and inequities of non-communicable disease worldwide. His scientific publications have received >60,000 citations (his current publication h-index is 82) and informed multiple global guidelines. His work has also received significant media attention, appearing in top-tier outlets like The New York Times, CNN and BBC.

Dr Chowdhury was elected a Fellow of the American College of Epidemiology in 2021, and a Fellow of the European Society of Cardiology in 2016. In 2013, he received the Bill Gates Senior Prize for contributions to global health. Rajiv holds a doctoral degree in Public Health from the University of Cambridge, where he had the titles of Commonwealth Scholar and Gates Cambridge Scholar. He also received advanced academic training in Global Health at the Harvard and Johns Hopkins Schools of Public Health, in Global Nutritional Epidemiology at the Imperial College London, in Genetic Epidemiology at the Erasmus University Netherlands, and in Clinical Trials at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

Dr Mia Gaudet is the senior scientist for the NCI’s Connect for Cancer Prevention Cohort study. In this role, Dr Gaudet operationalizes the scientific direction of the study, oversees cohort management and activities and serves as the study’s chair in the Executive and DCEG Steering Committees.

She is the author of over 200 scientific articles on dietary, hormonal, and genetic risk factors for subtypes of breast cancer in individual and pooled observational studies. She has also co-authored “Genetic Epidemiology of Breast Cancer” in Women & Health (2013) and “Breast Cancer Epidemiology” in the 4th edition of Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention (2017), a premier reference text in cancer epidemiology.

In 2023, Dr Gaudet was recognized with the NCI DCEG Women Scientist Advisor’s Award for Outstanding Mentoring and Leadership. Dr. Gaudet has held academic positions at the American Cancer Society, Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University, Memorial Sloan-Kettering, and Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Dr Gaudet obtained her doctoral degree in epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics at the NCI, where she currently works.

Dr Edward Giovannucci is a Professor of Nutrition and Epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr Giovannucci graduated from Harvard University in 1980, and he received his MD from University of Pittsburgh in 1984. He did his residency in anatomic pathology at the University of Connecticut and then completed ScD in epidemiology from the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health in 1992.

Over the past three decades, Dr Giovannucci’s work focuses on how nutritional, lifestyle and genetic factors affect the risk of development and progression of various malignancies, especially those of the large intestine, other gastrointestinal cancers, and prostate cancer. A specific interest has been understanding etiologic mechanisms underlying the relation between diet, physical activity, body weight and composition, and metabolic dysfunction and cancer risk. He currently serves as an American Cancer Society Clinical Researcher Professor.

Having worked in a number of roles in the Civil Service, Lynette has a wide range of administrative, communication, financial and counselling skills. She first became aware of WCRF when working as part of an in-house Employee Assistance Programme and supporting staff with cancer diagnoses amongst many other health and welfare situations. Since leaving the Civil Service, she has worked in various support roles and has had the privilege of working alongside people from all walks of life including those who have a range of cancers and other chronic long term physical and mental health conditions which benefit from the cancer prevention research outcomes.

Working alongside people and seeing the impact of lifestyle choices has made Lynette passionate about how diet, nutrition and exercise can help with many aspects of physical and mental health and have a desire to ensure as many people as possible can benefit from this field of knowledge and new areas of research.

Lynette has found WCRF publications and advice to be a wonderful resource both personally and as a practitioner and hopes to be able to help build on and contribute to these as the public representative on the Global Cancer Update Programme.

Ellen Kampman is a nutritional epidemiologist and Chair in Nutrition and Disease at Wageningen University.

The mission of the Nutrition and Disease group is to decrease the risk of (chronic) disease and improve the health of those with disease through healthy and sustainable nutrition. The group is a multi-disciplinary team, including medical biologists, nutritionists, epidemiologists and physicians, conducting observational and intervention studies in high and low/medium income countries.

Her own research over the last 40 years focuses on the role of lifestyle in cancer prevention and prognosis. She published more than 300 original scientific peer-reviewed papers and book chapters, was senior editor and reviewer of various scientific journals, and is a member of (inter)national advisory and scientific committees. She obtained research grants from governmental and non-governmental bodies and supervised more than 30 PhD students.

Ellen studied Nutrition and Health at Wageningen University, was a visiting fellow at the Boston Harvard School of Public Health and received postdoctoral training at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle, USA.

I am a Professor of Molecular Epidemiology in the Department of Population Health Sciences within the Medical School at the University of Bristol, where I have worked since January 2004.

My research is focused on Mendelian randomisation and synthesising evidence on biological mechanisms for disease, in particular in relation to cancer and orofacial cleft.

I’m currently a work package lead and co-investigator of a The Integrative Cancer Epidemiology Programme funded by CRUK.

I hold two WCRF project grants as PI and am a co-applicant on two further WCRF grants awarded to Dr Brigid Lynch at the Victoria Cancer Centre in Melbourne, Australia, and Dr Kostas Tsilidis at the University of Ioannina in Greece and Imperial College London.

I am also the Bristol lead for a recently awarded EU Horizon2020 grant on gallbladder cancer, and the Mendelian randomisation expert and training lead for the mental health strand of the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre grant.

Prof May is a professor in clinical epidemiology of cancer survivorship and Director of Research at the Julius Center for Health Sciences and Primary Care, University Medical Center Utrecht, The Netherlands. She also leads the “Lifestyle and Survivorship Care” group at the Netherlands Cancer Institute.

Prof May has been involved in exercise-oncology research for over 20 years, conducting multi-center randomized controlled trials to examine the effects of exercise on treatment-related side effects in patients with, amongst others, breast, colon or oesophageal cancer.

Currently, she is leading the international PREFERABLE consortium investigating effects of exercise in patients with metastatic breast cancer (EFFECT study) and effects of individualized live-remote exercise in patients with long lasting complaints after cancer treatment (LION-RCT) in Europe and Australia. She also serves at lifestyle and cancer related guideline panels (ASCO, ACSM).

Yikyung Park, ScD, is a Professor in the Division of Public Health Sciences, Department of Surgery at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Co-Leader of the Cancer Prevention and Control Program at the Alvin J. Siteman Cancer Center. She previously served at the U.S. National Cancer Institute, where she received the Award of Merit for her leadership of the NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study.

Prof Park’s research focuses on the impact of diet, lifestyle, and environmental exposures on cancer risk and outcomes in both pediatric and adult populations. She is also dedicated to advancing methods in nutritional epidemiology, including dietary assessments, measurement error corrections, and dietary biomarkers.

Additionally, as a member of the Cancer Screening Research Network, Prof Park conducts the Vanguard study evaluating the feasibility of a randomized clinical trial of multi-cancer detection assays.

Prof Park’s work has significantly influenced national and international guidelines, including the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and WCRF Cancer Prevention Recommendations.

Tobias Pischon is medical doctor and epidemiologist with a doctoral degree in medicine (Dr med.), a master degree in public health (MPH), and the facultas docendi (Habilitation) and the venia legendi in epidemiology and social medicine. He is Full Professor for Molecular Epidemiology at the Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin and Head of the Molecular Epidemiology Research Group and of the Biobank Technology Platform at the Max-Delbrück-Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC).

Past appointments include positions at the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA, and at the German Institute of Human Nutrition (DIfE). He has been working as investigator on the Nurses’ Health Studies I and II, the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, and the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC). He is among the principal investigators and member of the board of directors of the German National Cohort (NAKO Gesundheitsstudie).

Dr Pischon was stipend of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and received several awards from scientific societies. His research focuses on the impact of metabolic factors, diet and lifestyle on the risk of chronic diseases, particularly cancer, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. His research results have been published in major international journals.

I am a senior scientist in the field of biostatistics and cancer epidemiology with research interests in the use of novel tools and innovative approaches to study the aetiology of cancer and other chronic diseases associated with ageing.

After almost ten years as Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Director at the Cancer Epidemiology Centre (CEC) of the Cancer Council Victoria in Melbourne (Australia) where I coordinated research programs based on the Melbourne Collaborative Cohort Study around the aetiology of hormone-dependent cancers, and in particular prostate cancer, in 2015 I moved to France where I was recruited as Research Professor (Inserm, Directeur de Recherche) and Team Leader within the Centre for Research on Epidemiology and Population Health (CESP, UMR 1018). The team “Exposome, Heredity, Cancer and Health” that I created in 2020 conducts research to improve our knowledge of the aetiology of cancer and other chronic diseases through the study of the interplay between individual susceptibility, the exposome and its molecular signatures, and the biological processes that constitute the organism’s responses.

My team runs the multi-generation familial cohort E3N-Generations (www.e3n-generations.fr) that includes the French arm of EPIC (epic.iarc.fr) and aims at studying familial aggregation of risk factors and diseases and novel exposures in younger generations using innovative tools to collect information on lifestyle, environmental exposures and early biomarkers of chronic diseases and ageing.

Since 2019 I am an Associate Professor (part-time) at the University of Florence, Italy, and I teach courses in molecular epidemiology and biostatistics for medical students and for students of the master’s degree in nursing studies.