Samuel Aparicio

Dr. Aparicio is the Nan & Lorraine Robertson Chair in Breast Cancer Research, holds the Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Molecular Oncology, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is also Head of the Department of Molecular Oncology at BC Cancer and a Professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Aparicio's research program encompasses the fields of cancer genomics, cancer evolution, single cell biology, mouse genetic models, high throughput screens, small molecule chemical probe development, and translational breast cancer research.

Dr. Aparicio graduated in medical and natural sciences from Cambridge University (UK), clinical medicine from Oxford, and subsequently in internal medicine and pathology. After doctoral work with Sydney Brenner in Cambridge, he held a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellowship at the Wellcome/CRUK Developmental Biology Institute. From 2000-2005 he was a senior investigator in the Department of Oncology, Cambridge. He was a co-leader of the international consortium that sequenced the genome of the pufferfish Fugu rubripes in 2002. He moved to Vancouver in 2005 where he has been leading genomics research in cancer. He was a co-founder of Paradigm Therapeutics (eventually acquired by Takeda Pharma) and currently Contextual Genomics Ltd. His contributions to academic research have been widely published in scientific and clinical journals such as Nature, Science, Cell and The New England Journal of Medicine. He is the recipient of numerous awards from academic as well as industrial institutions.