Richard Tothill

Associate Professor Richard Tothill is a group leader within the University of Melbourne Centre for Cancer Research and heads the Rare Disease Oncogenomics Laboratory. His work involves understanding the genomic pathology of rare cancers, development of diagnostic methods and implementation clinical genomics for precision medicine. He completed his PhD training with Prof David Bowtell at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in 2005 and has more than 20 years experience working in cancer research, technology development and academic research with additional prior experience in the pharmaceutical industry (1998-2000, Glaxo-Welcome Genetics Division, UK). His past and current research has encompassed genomic landscape analyses of solid adult cancers including ovarian cancer, cancer of unknown primary and neuroendocrine neoplasias. He has been an early adopter of genomic technologies including next-generation DNA sequencing and bulk and single-cell gene-expression profiling methods. He currently co-leads the national Solving Unknown Primary Cancer (SUPER) suite of studies and is principal investigator for the MRFF funded SUPER-NEXT study involving deployment of clinical whole-genome sequencing and the application of liquid biopsy testing for patients with cancer of unknown primary.