Speakers

Dr. Clinton Boyd is a consultant pathologist and Clinical Director of Cellular Pathology at Belfast Health and Social Care Trust, reporting breast and thoracic pathology. He is a founder member and honorary secretary of the Association of Breast Pathology. He has recently been part of a team that successfully introduced digital pathology reporting to a busy cellular pathology laboratory.

Dr Rahul Deb is a consultant breast and gastrointestinal pathologist at University Hospitals of Derby and Burton (UHDB) with a particular interest in breast pathology. Rahul is the lead breast pathologist and the Specialty Advisor (breast) at the Royal College of Pathologists (RCPath-UK), deputy chair of the National Coordinating Committee for Breast Pathology (NCCBP) and the regional pathology clinical advisor for the NHS Breast screening programme (Midlands & East Region) . Rahul is also the clinical lead for the digital pathology project in his hospital.

Rahul has been involved in various national and international guidelines development groups. Currently, Rahul chairs the writing group updating the RCPath dataset on surgical excision specimens (Pathology reporting of breast disease in surgical excision specimens incorporating the dataset for histological reporting of breast cancers). He has also been a member of the writing group that developed the dataset for needle core biopsy reporting (Guidelines for non-operative diagnostic procedures and reporting in breast cancer screening) and ICCR dataset for surgically removed lymph nodes for breast tumours.

Rahul is a founder-member of the Association of Breast Pathology (ABP). It was his enthusiasm and drive, that was key in launching the ABP, with a key objective of advancing the knowledge and practice of breast pathology and supporting pathologists to do this. He is a regular speaker at many national and international meetings and publishes regularly in peer-reviewed journals.

Through his involvement with several national audits, Rahul hopes to continually improve standards in breast cancer. He is the clinical lead for the National Pathology Audit in Breast screening and the pathology representative for the new national breast cancer audits launched by the National Cancer Audit Collaborating Centre (NATCAN) in England.

Outside of pathology, Rahul plays tennis (badly!) and enjoys following most sports but is most passionate about cricket.

I am Emeritus Professor of Biochemical Endocrinology at the Institute of Cancer Research and Honorary Consultant Clinical Scientist at the Royal Marsden Hospital. I retired from RMH in August 2021 where I worked for 33 years most latterly having been inaugural Head of the Ralph Lauren Centre for Breast Cancer Research.

My research has focussed almost exclusively on breast cancer and predominantly on hormonal aspects of the disease and biomarkers of response. I was closely involved with the clinical development of aromatase inhibitors and in the creation of national and international standards for steroid receptor and HER2 analyses (ASCO/CAP Guidelines Steering Committees).

I am co-chair of the International Working Party for Ki67 in Breast Cancer. I was the founding chairman of the UK NCRI Translational Research (subsequently Biomarker and Imaging) Clinical Study Group and spent years on Executive Board of the Breast International Group (BIG). I am emeritus NCRI Senior Clinical Investigator and Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. I have been a trustee of Breast Cancer Now since 2021 and chair their Scientific Strategy Committee.

I authored /co-authored over 700 papers related to breast cancer have an H-index of 130 (July 2023).

Named lectures include the 2007 William L McGuire Memorial Lecture and the 2014 Susan G Komen Brinker Award for Scientific Distinction. 

I was inaugural chair of the UK Interdisciplinary Breast Cancer Symposium and am now Honorary President. 

Prof Ellis has been involved in the practice of pathology for forty years and has an international reputation in clinical and translational research in breast disease, particularly classification and molecular pathology of breast cancer and evaluation of prognostic factors. Author of over 750 peer reviewed scientific publications, chapters in medical textbooks and specialist textbooks in pathology

He is a Past President of the Pathological Society of Great Britain and Ireland. He has been a councillor of the BDIAP, Specialty Advisor to The Royal College of Pathologists, and is past Chairman of the UK National Co-ordinating Committee for Breast Pathology. He has acted as an advisor to the DoH, UICC, WHO and IARC.

Present position: Full professor of Anatomic Pathology at the University of Bologna, in charge for the lessons on Anatomic Pathology at the School of Dentistry and School of Medicine.

Director Histopathologist at the Section of Anatomic Pathology of the Department of Biomedical and Neuromotor Sciences of the University of Bologna, at Bellaria Hospital, Bologna.

Director of the School of Specialization in Anatomic Pathology, University of Bologna from 01/11/2013 till 06/05/2023.

Member  of the Academic Board of the PhD in Oncology, Haemathology and Pathology.

Main research focused on breast and head and neck tumours.

267 papers published and quoted in PubMed.

H index: 47; (Scopus).

Mr Ashu Gandhi works at Manchester University Hospitals, UK. In addition to his breast oncology practice, he is lead surgeon in the Manchester Breast Family History service. His research portfolio includes basic science collaborations and local/national projects examining care of women at high lifetime breast cancer risk. He has been involved in/led the NHS Breast Screening Audit, NHS Guidance for Commissioning Oncoplastic Surgery. He chaired the Clinical Standards Committee, Association of Breast Surgery and contributed to/chaired national guidance for managing pregnancy-associated breast cancer, B3 lesions, best practice oncoplastic breast surgery and mesh-assisted breast reconstruction. Most recently he chaired the group rewriting UK guidance on optimum DCIS excision margins.

Anita Grigoriadis, Professor of Molecular and Digital Pathology, is the joint Head of School for Cancer and Pharmaceutical Sciences in the Faculty of Life Sciences and Medicine at King’s College London and sits on the Executive Board of the CRUK City of London Centre.

After finishing her degree at the Institute of Molecular Pathology, University of Vienna (Austria), Anita pursued a joint PhD between the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, London, UK and the Paris Lodron University of Salzburg (Austria). Anita conducted her postdoctoral training on breast cancer genomics with Professor Alan Ashworth at Breakthrough Breast Cancer Centre (London). In 2008, she joined the Breast Cancer Now Unit (formerly Breakthrough Breast Cancer Research) at King’s under the leadership of Professor Andrew Tutt. Since 2013 Anita has led the translational Cancer Bioinformatics team(http://cancerbioinformatics.co.uk/) and recently initiated the Spatial Biology Network (https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/spatial-biology-network) at King’s. In October 2023, Anita became the Head of the Comprehensive Cancer Centre, comprising more than 40 different translational cancer research teams. 

Professor Louise Jones is a Professor of Breast Pathology at Barts Cancer Institute. Her research in breast cancer focuses on the progression of in situ to invasive disease.  In October 2019 she received a Pathology Excellence Award from the Royal College of Pathologists, nominated by her peers for her contribution to research, training and development of molecular pathology.

Richard Levenson is currently Professor, Dept. of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, UC Davis Health. After faculty positions at Duke and Carnegie Mellon, he joined Cambridge Research & Instrumentation, becoming VP of Research. He has helped develop multispectral microscopy, small-animal imaging, and birefringence microscopy, as well as MUSE and FIBI slide-free histology systems, is an inventor on ~15 patents and recipient of the 2018 UC Davis Chancellor's Innovator of the Year award.

Sarah E Pinder is Chair of Breast Pathology at King’s College London and Lead Breast Pathologist at Guy’s & St Thomas’ Hospitals.

She Chairs the National Coordinating Committee for Breast Pathology (NCCBP) for the Royal College of Pathologists & the UK NHS Breast Screening Programme. She is President of the Association of Breast Pathology. 

She has a large international referral practice. Her translational research interests are focused on in situ breast carcinoma, but include a wide range of collaborative work. She has published over 350 articles in the peer-reviewed literature, and over 100 invited articles and chapters in textbooks.

Dr Elena Provenzano is Lead Breast Histopathologist for Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, overseeing breast cancer diagnosis in the Cambridge Breast Unit. As a key link between the diagnostic service and breast cancer clinical trials and research programme, she is pathology lead for several breast cancer trials that include PARTNER and PBCP. Her main interests are the assessment of tumour response to neoadjuvant therapy and molecular biology of breast cancer. Elena is also Deputy for the PathLake Consortium in Cambridge, which has resulted in the implementation of digital pathology at Addenbrookes with upcoming trials looking at use of AI algorithms in breast cancer diagnosis and biomarker assessment.

Prof Abeer Shaaban is a Consultant Pathologist at Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham and Professor of Cancer and Genomic Sciences, University of Birmingham, UK. She is Professional Clinical Advisor (PCA) for the UK NHS Breast Screening Programme and Pathology lead for the NHS Genomic Medicine Service Alliance (GMSA) for Central and South. 

She led the NCRI Cellular and Molecular Pathology initiative (CM-PATH) Workstream 2 (Clinical Trials). She served as member of the International Committee of the Royal College of Pathologists (RCPath), member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Breast Cancer Now and Committee member for the Pathological Society of Great Britain and Ireland.

She published 200 peer reviewed publications and contributed to a number of guidelines guidelines including in the WHO Blue Book for  Genomic Syndromes 2023, the WHO Blue Book for Breast tumours 2019,  the International Collaboration on Cancer Reporting (ICCR)  DCIS dataset 2021, the RCPath Breast Pathology reporting guidelines (2023) and the European guidelines for the diagnosis, treatment and follow-up of breast lesions with uncertain malignant potential (B3 lesions) developed jointly by EUSOMA, EUSOBI, ESP (BWG) and ESSO. Her research interests include HER2 low breast cancer, tissue biomarker analysis, ethnic diversity of breast cancer, neoadjuvant chemotherapy and endocrine therapy.

Prof Shaaban co-edited a textbook of molecular pathology entitled “Molecular pathology for the practising surgical pathologist and cytopathologists”, led a large number of research studies and contributed to breast cancer trials as co-investigator, member of a Trial Management Group and as a central pathology reviewer. 
She lectured on a number of UK and international courses/conferences including San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, BDIAP, ESSO, EBBC, ECP and other. She is course director of the annual Birmingham Breast Pathology Update course.