Chair 

Prof Melissa  Southey OAM
Chair Precision Medicine, Monash University
Co-Director Monash Partners Comprehensive Cancer Consortium
Director, Biobanking Victoria
NHMRC Investigator Fellow (L3)

Distinguished Professor Melissa Southey, is a Molecular Geneticist, Founding Fellow of the Faculty of Science, Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia and an NHMRC L3 Investigator Fellow.

Professor Southey’s research program has a population-based focus that has been pivotal to the establishment of large genetic epidemiological research resources that are now addressing key questions in human health and disease.

Professor Southey is best known for her work with multiple-case cancer families and heritable risk factors that has provided the evidence base for best practice guidelines for the clinical management of individuals at high risk of the disease.

Speakers 

A/Prof Kyriaki Michailidou
Biostatistics Unit Lead, Cyprus Institute of Neurology and Genetics

A/Prof Michailidou's research focuses on deciphering the genetic architecture of breast cancer through the integration of large-scale genomic and population-based data. She has played a leading role in international consortia to identify common susceptibility loci through genome-wide association studies (GWAS), contributing to the discovery of numerous risk variants.

Her work extends to fine mapping and functional annotation, with the goal of resolving GWAS signals to identify likely causal variants.

In addition to common variant research, A/Prof Michailidou focuses on the clinical classification of variants of uncertain significance (VUS) in high- and moderate-risk breast and ovarian cancer susceptibility genes. Her research involves developing and applying statistical methods to large case–control datasets, evaluating the role of tumour histopathology in variant interpretation, and identifying “atypical risk” variants—those that confer risk profiles differing from typical pathogenic variants in the same gene.