Christopher Wild obtained his PhD in 1984 from the University of Manchester, UK, and was awarded an IARC postdoctoral fellowship (held at IARC) and subsequently a UK Royal Society European Exchange Fellowship (at the Netherlands Cancer Institute, Amsterdam). In 1987, he rejoined IARC as a staff scientist and later became Chief of the Unit of Environmental Carcinogenesis. In 1996, he was appointed to the Chair of Molecular Epidemiology at the University of Leeds; he headed the Centre for Epidemiology and Biostatistics and became Director of the Leeds Institute of Genetics, Health and Therapeutics in December 2005. Dr Wild was elected Director of IARC from 1 January 2009.
The main research interest of Dr Wild is to understand the interplay between environmental and genetic risk factors in the causation of human cancer. He proposed the concept of the “exposome” to match the genome in order to better address this research topic. He has particularly sought to apply biomarkers in population-based studies to this end in relation to liver and oesophageal cancers. He supervises directly the Gambia Hepatitis Intervention Study.
An expanded curriculum vitae for the Director is available here
