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.

Council meeting November 2019

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.

Immediate Past Chair - Matthew Kalady (USA)

Matthew Kalady is Chief of Colorectal Surgery and Medical Director of the Clinical Cancer Genetics Program at Ohio State University. He has an active clinic practice treating patients with hereditary colorectal cancer syndromes and an extensive track record in both clinical and scientific publications on hereditary CRC syndromes. He was previously Director of the Sanford R Weiss Center for Hereditary Colorectal Neoplasia at the Cleveland Clinic, and has also served as the President of the Collaborative Group of the Americas on Hereditary Colorectal Cancer (2013-14).

Honorary Secretary - Andrew Latchford (UK)

Andrew Latchford is Consultant Gastroenterologist at St Mark's Hospital and Honorary Senior Lecturer at Imperial College, London. He is Assistant Director of the St Mark's Hospital Polyposis Registry 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.

Honorary Treasurer - Ian Frayling (UK)

Ian Frayling is Honorary Consulting Pathologist at St Mark's Hospital, London. He was Consultant in Genetic Pathology in Cardiff, Wales. His work now concentrates on mutation interpretation and systematic testing of incident cancers to identify hereditary cases. He is also an assessor for the UK National External Quality Assessment Scheme in Immunohistochemistry. He is a founder member of InSiGHT, InSiGHT’s Variant Interpretation Committee, and the Mallorca Group.

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.

Brandie Leach (USA)

Brandie Heald Leach is Clinical Program Manager with Invitae. Previously she was genetic counsellor in the Genomic Medicine Institute and Sanford R Weiss Center for Hereditary Colorectal Neoplasia at Cleveland Clinic, coordinating the Cleveland Clinic Universal Lynch Syndrome Screening Program and conducting research on the hamartomatous polyposis syndromes. She was on the board for Hereditary Colon Cancer Takes Guts, and is past president of the Collaborative Group of the Americas on Hereditary Colorectal Cancer. She is currently on the Board of Directors for the Lynch Syndrome Screening Network.

Finlay Macrae (Australia)

Finlay Macrae is Professor in the Department of Medicine, University of Melbourne, Australia and Head of Colorectal Medicine and Genetics at The Royal Melbourne Hospital. He was a founding member of the antecedent Leeds Castle Polyposis Group, and instigated creation of the InSiGHT MMR database, its Variant Interpretation Committee, and the association with the Human Variome Project.

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.

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.

Allan Spigelman (Australia)

Allan Spigelman is Professor of Surgery at the University of New South Wales, and Director of St Vincent's Hereditary Cancer Clinic. He described the most widely used classification for upper gastrointestinal polyposis in FAP patients while a research fellow at St Mark’s Hospital. He has gone on to establish cancer genetic clinics across his state in Australia, and remains active in the cancer genetic research area. He was Chair of InSiGHT council and hosted the biennial meeting of InSiGHT in Cairns in 2013.