Andrew Blackford is a group leader in the Department of Oncology, based at the MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine. He is also affiliated with the Cancer Research UK/MRC Oxford Institute for Radiation Oncology. His group studies the signalling mechanisms cells use to respond to DNA damage and why defects in these pathways cause human diseases such as cancer.
After obtaining his PhD in the School of Cancer Sciences at the University of Birmingham in 2008, he undertook postdoctoral positions with Wojciech Niedzwiedz at the University of Oxford in 2009 and Steve Jackson in the Wellcome Trust/CRUK Gurdon Institute at the University of Cambridge in 2012. He was awarded a Cancer Research UK Career Development Fellowship to start his own group and took up his current post in June 2016.