Professor David Thomas
Professor David Thomas is CEO of Omico: the Australian Genomic Cancer Medicine Centre and inaugural Director of the Centre for Molecular Oncology at UNSW. He undertook his medical training at the University of Melbourne (1982-1988), followed by post-graduate training as a Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians in Medical Oncology (awarded 1997). He undertook his doctoral studies at the University of Melbourne, and was awarded his PhD in 1997.
David undertook post-doctoral research at Harvard Medical School (1998-2000), before moving back to Melbourne to set up his own laboratory, initially at St Vincent’s Hospital (2001-2003), then at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre (2002-2014).
He was the founding Chair and board member of the Australasian Sarcoma Study Group (2007-18). He was the Director of the adolescent and young adult (AYA) cancer program, onTrac@PeterMac (2005-2010). In 2018, he was the President of the Connective Tissue Oncology Society. He heads the Garvan Institute of Medical Research’s Genomic Cancer Medicine Laboratory.
In 2018, he established Omico, the Australian Genomic Cancer Medicine Centre.
Awards
- 2020Herman Suit Lecturer - Connective Tissue Oncology Society
- 2018President - Connective Tissue Oncology Society
- 2016NHMRC Principal Research Fellow
- 2012NHMRC Senior Research Fellow Level B
- 2011Victorian Cancer Agency - Clinician Researcher Fellowship
- 2009NHMRC Ten of the Best. Fellowship elected as one of the 10 best NHMRC investments for 2009
- 2008Sam Sciacca Visiting Fellow - Queensland Cancer Council
- 2007Victorian Cancer Agency - Clinician Researcher Fellowship
- 2006Edna and Murray Dunn Award
- 2003Puzey fellowship - University of Melbourne
- 2003RD Wright NHMRC Career Development Award
- 2002Arnott Fellowship - Royal Australasian College of Physicians
- 2000John Taplin Fellow - Harvard Medical School
- 1998Neil Hamilton Fairley National Health and Medical Research Council Fellowship
Selected publications
See all publications- 2023Science (New York, N.Y.)10.1126/science.abj4784
Heritable defects in telomere and mitotic function selectively predispose to sarcomas.
- 2022Nature Medicine10.1038/s41591-022-01717-2
Delivering precision oncology to patients with cancer.
- 2021NPJ Precision Oncology10.1038/s41698-021-00194-z
Criteria-based curation of a therapy-focused compendium to support treatment recommendations in precision oncology.
- 2020Nature Communications10.1038/s41467-019-14079-0
The Medical Genome Reference Bank contains whole genome and phenotype data of 2570 healthy elderly.
- 2020Science (New York, N.Y.)10.1126/science.aau8768
MTOR signaling orchestrates stress-induced mutagenesis, facilitating adaptive evolution in cancer.