Research Committee members

	Professor Graham Mann Committee Chairman Professor Graham Mann is a Professor in Medicine at The University of Sydney at Melanoma Institute Australia and Westmead Millennium Institute. He is a Co-Director of Research at Melanoma Institute Australia. After training in medical oncology at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital he worked as a graduate student at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, Sydney Branch, and at the University of Umeå in Sweden. In 1990 he moved to the Westmead campus of Sydney Medical School to work in cancer genetics. Professor Mann is a founding member and principal investigator of the international Melanoma Genetics Consortium (GenoMEL). As a founding member of the Kathleen Cuningham Consortium for Research in Familial Breast Cancer (kConFab), he chaired its Data and Analysis Subcommittee until 2008. He was President of the Australian Society for Medical Research in 1996. Professor Mann is Associate Dean (Research) in Sydney Medical School and Chair of the University of Sydney Cancer Research Network. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Cancer Council NSW and on its Governance Committee.
	Professor Rick Kefford AM Professor Rick Kefford is a Co-Director of Research at Melanoma Institute Australia. He is Professor of Medicine at the University of Sydney and Director of the Westmead Institute for Cancer Research, where much of the laboratory-based research of the Institute is conducted. Professor Kefford is the Chair of the Division of Medicine, Westmead Hospital and Consultant Medical Oncologist to the Institute where he is involved in the conduct of a large number of clinical trials of new anti-melanoma drugs.
	Professor John Thompson Professor John Thompson is both the Director of Melanoma Institute Australia and Professor of Melanoma and Surgical Oncology of the University of Sydney. He is author of over 500 peer-reviewed articles and holds positions on the editorial boards of several international journals. Professor Thompson is the immediate past President of the International Sentinel Node Society, Chairman of the Australian and New Zealand Melanoma Trials Group, and Chairman of the NSW Melanoma Network. He is also a member of the Melanoma Staging Committee of the American Joint Committee on Cancer.
	Professor Richard Scolyer Professor Richard Scolyer, a graduate of the University of Tasmania (BMedSci and MBBS) and the University of Sydney (MD), is a senior staff specialist in the Anatomical Pathology Department at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and a Clinical Professor at the University of Sydney. He is a Co-Director of Research at Melanoma Institute Australia. Professor Scolyer was the Melanoma and Skin Cancer Research Institute's Inaugural Pathology Research Fellow. He has spoken on melanocytic pathology at conferences both within Australia and overseas, and is a coauthor of more than 150 articles and book chapters on melanocytic pathology and related research.
	Professor Peter Hersey Professor Peter Hersey graduated in medicine (University of Adelaide) and science (University of Oxford) where he completed a D.Phil in tumor immunology. He has worked closely with the Sydney and Newcastle Melanoma Units on immunological aspects of melanoma and has been the principal investigator for a number of clinical trials. Professor Hersey is Professor of Melanoma Biology at The University of Sydney and Consultant Immunologist to Melanoma Institute Australia. As a member of the International Melanoma Working Group and the Global Melanoma Task Force, he has contributed extensively to studies on sensitivity of melanoma cells to apoptosis induced by the immune system, chemotherapy and treatments which sensitize melanoma to therapy. He holds the view that overcoming resistance to cell death pathways in melanoma holds the key to advances in treatment of melanoma. Professor Hersey is a joint holder of a NHMRC Program grant for studies on melanoma, is on the editorial board of a number of international journals and has contributed extensively to melanoma research with over 280 papers on original melanoma research.
	Professor Diona Damian Diona Damian is Professor of Dermatology at The University of Sydney and Clinical Academic in Dermatology at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. Her research has so far produced more than 50 publications and more than 700 citations. Professor Damian’s research interests include the role of skin immunity in skin cancer development. Her research focuses on the causation, prevention and treatment of skin cancer.
	Professor Nicholas Hayward Professor Nicholas Hayward is an NHMRC Senior Principal Research Fellow and Head of the Oncogenomics Laboratory at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research, Brisbane. He is a molecular biologist who joined Melanoma Institute Australia in 2011 as a member of the Research Committee. Professor Hayward has studied the molecular genetics of melanoma for more than 25 years and is a foundation member of the International Melanoma Genetics Consortium (GenoMEL) and the Society for Melanoma Research (SMR). His work focuses on identifying high and low penetrance melanoma predisposition genes through linkage and association analyses, positional cloning and candidate gene studies, as well as whole-genome and exome sequencing. Additionally, a large part of his research program involves identification and characterization of somatic mutations or gene expression differences associated with melanoma development and progression.
	Associate Professor Jonathan Stretch AM Associate Professor Jonathan Stretch has been the Deputy Director of the Melanoma Institute Australia since its inception in 2007. As an Associate Professor of Melanoma and Skin Oncology at The University of Sydney, he undertook his surgical training in Sydney becoming a Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons (Plastic Surgery) in 1987. Thereafter he was Overseas Fellow at the Radcliffe Infirmary and Research Fellow in the Nuffield Department of Surgery, Oxford. His doctoral research investigated the local dissemination of melanoma. He was appointed to Royal North Shore Hospital in 1991 and the Sydney Melanoma Unit in 2002. Associate Professor Stretch was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 2012.
	Lauren Haydu Committee Secretary Originally from the US, Lauren Haydu trained in chemical engineering and has research experience in molecular biology. She worked for four years on the Human Genome Project at Stanford University and for two years on breast cancer molecular diagnostics for Genentech, Inc. before coming to Sydney. Lauren has been focusing on melanoma research for the past six years starting as a casual researcher conducting literature search and selection for the evidence base of the latest Australian and New Zealand guidelines for the management of melanoma. She joined the Melanoma Network in 2007, and conducted two research studies on the quality of histopathological reporting on melanoma in NSW and melanoma recurrence in NSW. Lauren is now the Manager of Research and Biostatistics at Melanoma Institute Australia.