Biography

Professor Montserrat García-Closas received her M.D. from the University of Barcelona, Spain, a Master of Public Health in quantitative methods, and a Doctorate of Public Health in epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health. She joined the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics (DCEG) of the National Cancer Institute in the USA in 1996 as a postdoctoral fellow, became a tenure-track investigator in 1999 and a tenured senior investigator in 2007. From 2008-2010, she was a visiting scientist at the Department of Oncology and Strangeways Laboratory, Cambridge University, U.K. In 2010, she became a Professor of Epidemiology at the Division of Genetic and Epidemiology of the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), University of London, U.K. In 2015, she returned to DCEG as Deputy Director and senior investigator. She served as Interim Branch Chief for the Integrative Tumor Epidemiology Branch (ITEB) from 2016-2020, and as Director of the Trans-Divisional Research Program (TDRP) from 2020-2023. In 2023 she returned to the ICR in London as Professor of Epidemiology.

Professor García-Closas investigates the causes of cancer with the aim of understanding carcinogenic processes and improving risk assessment for precision prevention. She carries out a multidisciplinary research program on the genetic susceptibility, etiologic heterogeneity, and risk prediction for breast cancer. She is the principal investigator (PI) of the Breast Cancer Now Generations Study, a prospective cohort study of 110,000 women in the UK to study cancer aetiology and its outcomes, and the Male Breast Cancer Study, a case-control study of 2,000 men with breast cancer and 1,500 controls to study the genetic and environmental causes of male breast cancer. Professor Garcia-Closas also contributes to molecular epidemiology studies of bladder and other cancers.

Professor García-Closas is a founder member of several large consortia. She served as the Chair of the Coordinating Committee for the International Consortium of Case-Control Studies of Bladder Cancer from 2005-2011, and since 2006 she co-Chairs the Pathology and Survival Working Group of the Breast Cancer Association Consortium (BCAC). Professor Garcia-Closas co-led the European Commission Horizon 2020-funded Breast CAncer STratification (BCAST) Project within BCAC. She initiated and is the Chair of the Scientific Steering Committee for the Confluence Project which brings together multiple consortia for trans-ancestry genetic susceptibility studies of female and male breast cancer. She is an active member of the NCI Cohort Consortium, where she co-leads the Breast Cancer Prediction Project, an NCI Cohort Consortium collaboration to develop a comprehensive tool to predict breast cancer risk, overall and by sub-types, across major racial/ethnic groups. She served as the founding PI of Connect for Cancer Prevention (2016-2023), a new prospective study of 200,000 adults in the USA, and she currently serves in the International Advisory Committee.