Peter Campbell

Peter Campbell FMedSci is Head of the Cancer, Ageing and Somatic Mutation Programme at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and a Professor at the University of Cambridge. He is one of the world's leading cancer genomicists, with foundational contributions to the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) consortium and to the COSMIC database of somatic mutations in cancer. His laboratory pioneered the systematic classification of mutational signatures (SBS, DBS, ID classes) using non-negative matrix factorization, establishing the COSMIC signatures catalogue now used globally in cancer genomics research and clinical diagnostics. Campbell's work on clonal haematopoiesis revealed how somatic mutations accumulate in ageing blood stem cells and predispose to haematological malignancies. His group also performed landmark whole-genome sequencing studies of acute myeloid leukaemia, myeloproliferative neoplasms, and multiple myeloma, uncovering driver mutation landscapes and evolutionary trajectories. He has led major international collaborative studies through ICGC and PCAWG, and his algorithms for driver gene discovery and signature extraction (SigProfiler) are standard tools in the field. Campbell is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and recipient of numerous honours including the AACR Award for Outstanding Achievement in Cancer Research.