Rita Lawlor is co-founder of the ARC-Net applied cancer research centre where she coordinates research activities and runs the cancer biobank.
She has extensive project management experience and managed the Italian initiative in ICGC and is co-PI for the ARGO project. She currently coordinates the national Italian Cancer Research Association funded project “Clinically applicable biomarkers to early diagnosis, patient risk stratification and therapeutic response in pancreas cancer”.
She is a member of the steering committee of BC-NET (Biobank Cohort Network of Low Middle Income Countries) network of IARC (International Association for Research on Cancer). She is a former director of ISBER, International Society for Biological and Environmental Repositories (www.isber.org) and is past president of ESBB, the European, Middle Eastern and African Society for Biopreservation and Biobanking (www.esbb.org). She is currently on the board of the Italian Foundation for Pancreas diseases (FIMP).
Rita is originally a Computer Science graduate with a doctorate in translational biomedical sciences in Oncological Pathology. More recently she was conferred with a fellow of Information Privacy from IAPP (International Association of Privacy Professionals) and is chair of the ISBER GDPR Task Force.
Her current research interests are in molecular diagnostic markers and therapeutic targets and the role of cancer heterogeneity and molecular characterization of samples in the application of personalized medicine.