Dr. Alan Spatz is Professor of Pathology and Oncology at McGill University, Head of the Department of Laboratory medicine at McGill University Health Center (MUHC) and Medical Director of Optilab Montreal-MUHC that is an integrated network of labs belonging to McGill affiliated hospitals. He is also Director of the Molecular Pathology Center at the Jewish General Hospital/Segal Cancer Center, and of the “X chromosome and cancer” research lab at the Lady Davis Institute. Dr. Spatz received his medical education in Paris, France, and worked at Gustave Roussy cancer institute in Villejuif, France, from 1994 to 2008.

Dr. Spatz serves on the board and steering committee of several international and Canadian research organizations that include the WIN Consortium (winconsortium.org), the Canadian BEAT-cancer Coalition for advanced molecular diagnostics, Exactis Innovation (exactis.ca) that organizes longitudinal molecular testing for therapy matching. He is currently the president of the Oncology committee of the Quebec network of molecular diagnostics and co-chair of the Correlative sciences committee of the Canadian Cancer Trials Group (CCTG), and serves on the correlative sciences committee of the US NCI. He was president of several clinical research organizations, including the Melanoma and Pathobiology groups of the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer, the Melanoma committee of the CCTG, and was president of the French division of the International Academy of Pathology.

Dr. Spatz has published more than 220 peer reviewed articles and booksin highly ranked journals including Nature Medicine, Nature Cancer, Nature Cancer Reviews, Lancet, Lancet Oncology, Science Translational Medicine, and Journal of Clinical Oncology. Among other discoveries, his group was the first to demonstrate the role of X chromosome-related tumor suppressor gene haploinsufficiency in cancer.