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Professor Cathrin Brisken

Group Leader

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Professor Cathrin Brisken leads the Endocrine Control Mechanisms Group. Her research aims to understand how recurrent exposures to hormones contribute to breast cancer in order to better prevent and treat the disease. Group: Endocrine Control Mechanisms
+44 20 7153 5175 ORCID 0000-0002-6857-3230

Biography

Professor Cathrin Brisken obtained her MD and a PhD in Biophysics from the University of Göttingen, Germany. She did postdoctoral work at the Whitehead Institute, MIT, Cambridge, USA, where she began to genetically dissect the in vivo role of reproductive hormones in the mammary gland. 

She held appointments at the Cancer Center of the Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School and the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research in Lausanne before joining the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne, EPFL, where she has an active transdisciplinary laboratory. She served as Dean of the EPFL Doctoral School, in the AACR Women in Cancer Research Council and is member of the IBCSG Biological Protocol Working Group and the Pezcoller Symposia Scientific Committee. She cofounded the International Cancer Prevention Institute.

Professor Brisken's research focuses on the cellular and molecular underpinnings of estrogen, progesterone, and androgen receptor signalling in the breast epithelium and their respective roles in breast cancer development. The aim is to understand how endogenous and exogenous hormones affect breast carcinogenesis to better prevent and treat the disease.