Professor Swanton completed his PhD in 1998 at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratories on the UCL MBPhD program before completing his medical oncology and Cancer Research UK funded post-doctoral clinician scientist training in 2008. Charles was appointed Medical Research Council and Cancer Research UK senior clinical research fellow and Group Leader of the Translational Cancer Therapeutics laboratory at the CR-UK London Research Institute in 2008 focusing on personalised cancer medicine through an understanding of mechanisms of drug resistance, intratumourheterogeneity and genomic instability. He combines his laboratory research with clinical duties focused on biological mechanisms of drug resistance in lung and breast cancer. Charles worked as a consultant medical oncologist at the Royal Marsden Hospital with an interest in early phase drug development for the treatment of specific subtypes of metastatic solid tumours (2008-2011). Charles has had the lead and corresponding author publications in Nature, Cancer Cell, PNAS, Lancet Oncology and The New England Journal of Medicine. Charles is a member of several translational research scientific committees including the Cancer Research UK Sciences Committee and ESMO translational working group. He leads the scientific aspects of the EU Framework Program 7 PREDICT consortium. According to Thomson Reuters, his paper in NEJM in 2012 was the most highly cited in biomedicine in 2012. Charles was made Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in April 2011 and was appointed to the Chair in Personalised Cancer Medicine at the University College London Cancer Institute and Consultant Medical Oncologist at UCL Hospitals, Thoracic Oncology Unit in November 2011. Charles is the Chief Investigator of the CR-UK TRACERx national lung cancer evolution study to decipher clonal evolution through the disease course and is director of the CR-UK UCL Lung Cancer Centre. Charles was recently promoted to the tenured position of Senior Group Leader at the CR-UK London Research Institute and was awarded the Royal College of Physicians Goulstonian lecture and Graham Bull Prize for Clinical Sciences in 2013.

 Oncology