The 2016 Burkitt Medal will be awarded to Dr Paul Brennan, Head of the Genetics Section of the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France. The medal will be awarded at 2016 Cancer Conference dinner taking place tonight in Trinity’s Dining Hall.
The Burkitt medal recognises outstanding dedication, integrity and compassion in a medical scientist who has made a substantial contribution to the area of cancer research, and is named after Dr Denis Burkitt, a Trinity graduate known for the discovery of Burkitt’s Lymphoma in 1958.
The award comes as Trinity today announced the development of a new cancer institute in St James’s Hospital, making it the first institute of its kind in Ireland.
The medal has been awarded annually by Trinity since 2013, and this year marks the 10th International Cancer Conference to be held in Trinity. The conference was founded in 1999 the the Department of Health in Ireland and Northern Ireland, with help from the government of the US.
Burkitt was born in 1911 in Fermanagh and was the son of James Parsons Burkitt, a civil engineer. Despite having lost an eye at the age of 11, Burkitt went on to study engineering in Trinity. However, during his first year at university he became involved with Room 40, a group of undergraduates who would meet regularly for prayer and bible study. Soon after joining, Burkitt felt God call him to devote his life to medicine, which he did. Burkitt graduated in 1935 with an MB and continued his surgical training, obtaining Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh in 1938.
Later in life, Burkitt enlisted into the Royal Army Medical Corps and was posted to a military hospital in Kenya where he discovered the causes of a pediatric cancer, Burkitt’s lymphoma.
Brennan, the recipient of this year’s award, was awarded his PhD in Genetic Epidemiology at the University of Manchester in 1995. His current group at the International Agency for Research on Cancer have two primary objectives, the first being to identify genes that predispose individuals to development of cancer, and the second to being establish novel biomarkers that indicate non-genetic risk factors for cancer that will potentially enable identification of cancers in their early stages.
His group collaborates with other scientists from all over the world and currently has a number of active field work studies underway in Europe, Asia and Latin America. Brennan specialises in the field of lung, head and neck cancers, kidney cancer and lymphomas.
Previous awardees include some of the biggest names in cancer research, such as Riccardo Dalla-Favera, Professor of Pathology and Cell Biology and Director at Institute for Cancer Genetics at Columbia University and John L Ziegler, Founding Director of the Global Health Sciences Graduate Programme at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).
This evening Brennan will deliver the keynote Burkitt Lecture entitled “Cancer Prevention: from Denis Burkitt to the Human Genome Project”.
