Council

Council members are elected by the membership of InSiGHT at the biennial InSiGHT meeting. They serve a term of four years, and attend two council meetings each year, usually held in London.

Council documents, including minutes of council meetings can be downloaded below. Older documents and application forms to stand for election to council are available from the secretariat on request.

InSiGHT needs a dynamic  and diverse council in order to reach its goals, and encourages active members to consider standing for election to council. If you are interested please contact the secretariat for more information.

Co-chair - Gabriel Capella (Spain)

Gabriel Capella is Director of the Hereditary Cancer Program at the Catalan Institute of Oncology. He trained as a general and digestive surgeon in Barcelona, and is also accredited in Human Genetics by the Spanish Society of Human Genetics. His research focuses in the study of the genetic basis of gastrointestinal cancer with a particular interest in hereditary colorectal cancer.

Co-chair - Nicoline Hoogerbrugge (Netherlands)

Nicoline Hoogerbrugge is Professor in Hereditary Cancer at Radboud University Medical Center, Nijmegen. She has been directly involved in identification of several genes involved in hereditary colorectal cancer, including EPCAM, BUB1, BUB3, FOCAD and recently NTHL1. She also works on dendritic cell vaccinations for cancer prevention in healthy carries of a Lynch syndrome mutation.

Chair-elect - Joanne Ngeow (Singapore)

Joanne Ngeow is Senior Consultant and head of the Cancer Genetics Service at the National Cancer Centre Singapore and Associate Professor at Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Nanyang Technological University. She led the introduction of universal MMR testing for colon and endometrial cancer and the National Precision Medicine Clinical Implementation Pilot for Lynch Syndrome and is funded by the National Medical Research Council and Ministry of Health to explore gene-environmental interactions in cancer initiation and the equitable implementation of genomics into clinical care. She serves on the ClinGen PTEN Variant Curation Expert Panel and the Scientific Advisory Board of PTEN Foundation, USA.

Honorary Treasurer - Laura Valle (Spain)

Laura Valle is a researcher at the IDIBELL Hereditary Cancer Group in Barcelona, focused on the identification and characterisation of new hereditary colorectal cancer and polyposis genes and syndromes and development of experimental models for the interpretation of genetic variants. She is currently a member of the Board of the European Society of Human Genetics, and previously served on the Executive Board of the Spanish Society of Human Genetics as Treasurer.

Honorary Secretary - Andrew Latchford (UK)

Andrew Latchford is a gastroenterologist at St Mark's Hospital and Honorary Senior Lecturer at Imperial College, London. He is Co-Director of the St Mark’s Hospital Centre for Familial Intestinal Cancer and currently supervises research on upper GI tract disease in polyposis syndromes, pouch polyps in FAP, serrated polyposis syndrome and identification/management outcomes in Lynch syndrome. He was an expert advisor to NICE in the development of guidelines for universal tumour MMR testing.

Francesc Balaguer (Spain)

Francesc Balaguer is Chief of the Gastroenterology Department at Hospital Clinic of Barcelona and Associate Professor at the University of Barcelona. His research has focused on improving the clinical and molecular characterisation of high-risk forms of CRC, such as Lynch syndrome and serrated polyposis syndrome and development of dendritic-based cancer vaccines in Lynch syndrome. He is currently part of the Research Group of the Collaborative Group of the Americas on Inherited Gastrointestinal Cancer.

Daniel Buchanan (Australia)

Daniel Buchanan heads the Colorectal Oncogenomics Group in the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Cancer Research. He holds an honorary appointment within the Genomic Medicine and Familial Cancer Centre, Royal Melbourne Hospital, and leadership roles with the Colon Cancer Family Registry, the Genetic Epidemiology of Colorectal Cancer Consortium, the Genetics of Colonic Polyposis Study, and the ClinGen-InSiGHT CRC-Polyposis Variant Curation Expert Panel. He is committed to the translation of research to clinical practice, and has a role in the Australian eviQ Cancer Genetics Reference Committee tasked with providing national guidelines for testing and management of hereditary cancer syndromes.

Marc Greenblatt (USA)

Marc Greenblatt is a medical oncologist at the University of Vermont Medical Center and a Professor at the Larner College of Medicine at UVM in Burlington, Vermont.

His primary research focus is interpreting genetic variants, and translating genetics advances to the clinic. He is Chair of the InSiGHT Hereditary Colorectal Cancer/Polyposis Variant Curation Expert Panel, He has been a member of the InSiGHT Mismatch Repair Variant Interpretation Committee since its origin. He sits on the InSiGHT Variants Databases Governance Committee, is Past President of the Collaborative Group of the Americas on Inherited Colorectal Cancer, President of the Human Genome Variation Society and xecutive Board Member of the Human Genome Organization.

Sonia Kupfer (USA)

Sonia Kupfer is a gastroenterologist at the University of Chicago. She launched the GI Cancer Risk and Prevention Clinic in 2011 that now serves hundreds of patients locally and regionally. She is active in clinical and translational NIH-funded research as well as collaborations in international consortia, guidelines, and educational programs. In 2017 she served as President of CGA-ICG , and continues as a member of the CGA Fund and Education committees.

Kevin Monahan (UK)

Kevin Monahan is agastroenterologist and Co-Director of the St Mark’s Hospital Centre for Familial Intestinal Cancer, which incorporates the Family Cancer, Lynch Syndrome Clinics and Polyposis Registry. He is the lead for the National Lynch Syndrome Transformation Project, which aims both to ‘Find the missing 95%’ of people with Lynch syndrome in the UK, and to provide optimal care through a new national colonoscopic screening programme. He is an honorary senior clinical lecturer at Imperial College London, member of the scientific board of PLSD, and medical boards of the charities Bowel Cancer UK & Lynch Syndrome UK.

Toni Seppälä (Finland)

Toni Seppälä has worked as a colorectal surgeon since board certification in 2018, and was appointed as associate professor at the University of Helsinki in 2019. In 2019–2021 he undertook a research fellowship at the department of Surgical Oncology, Johns Hopkins University and Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center in Baltimore, USA. In 2022, he was appointed as a tenure track professor of cancer research at the University of Tampere, Finland and leads research groups in Tampere and Helsinki Universities. He serves on the board of Directors of the European Hereditary Tumour Group, the scientific committee of the Prospective Lynch Syndrome Database, and as a Secretary of the Finnish Society of Surgery.