Submitted by Catherine Atkins on Fri, 18/10/2024 - 08:30
We are delighted to announce that, following an international search and highly competitive process, Dr Jamie Blundell has been elected to the Ursula Zoellner Professorship of Cancer Research within the Department of Oncology. The University’s Board of Electors were unanimous in their decision to elect Jamie.
After training as a theoretical physicist at the University of Cambridge, Jamie spent five years at Stanford University as a postdoc working the on the dynamics of clonal evolution. He established his own independent research group in Cambridge in 2017, focusing on the somatic evolution of human tissues and using this understanding to detect cancer earlier. His lab has been based in the Early Cancer Institute since its launch in 2022.
Jamie is also the Anthony L Lyster Fellow in Natural Sciences at Queens’ College, Cambridge and was awarded a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship in 2019, which supports much of his group’s research. In 2022 he co-founded Synteny, a start-up company using high-throughput data and generative AI to design precision T-cell receptor (TCR) guided therapies for cancer patients.
Jamie said: “I am truly honoured to be appointed as the Ursula Zoellner Professor of Cancer Research. This is an extraordinary time in cancer research, where we are gaining the ability to understand cancer at its earliest stages. This knowledge opens up new, rational approaches to predicting future cancers and intervening to prevent them from developing. Being based at the Early Cancer Institute on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus will enable us to fully leverage Cambridge’s remarkable environment, allowing us to establish a world-class, multidisciplinary research team focused on translating our discoveries into patient benefit more rapidly.”
The Ursula Zoellner Professorship of Cancer Research was established with a generous gift from Dr F A Zoellner, who studied at Gonville and Caius College in the 1930s, in memory of his wife Ursula. Ashok Venkitaraman was the inaugural the Ursula Zoellner Professor of Cancer Research from 1998–2020.
We offer our warmest congratulations to Jamie on his Professorship.