Thomas Helleday - Biography#

Thomas Helleday is Swedish and obtained PhD in 1999 from Stockholm University on his studies on homologous recombination in mammalian cells. After a short post-doctoral research period with Mark Meuth at the Institute for Cancer Studies, University of Sheffield, UK, he obtained a lectureship in 2000 at the same institute and set up his own group, with an interest in homologous recombination at replication forks in mammalian cells. At the same time, he maintained grants and a position at the Stockholm University. Dr Helleday became professor at both University of Sheffield and Stockholm University in 2006, prior to being recruited as MRC Professor of Cancer Therapeutics at the MRC/CRUK Gray Institute for Radiation Oncology and Biology at the University of Oxford. In 2012, he was called to the Torsten and Ragnar Söderberg Professor of Translational Medicine and Chemical Biology at Science for Life Laboratory at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, heading a division for translational medicine. In 2018 he returned to University of Sheffield to establish the Sheffield Cancer Centre, a joint initiative between the NHS and the University. Following the corona pandemic, he returned to Karolinska Institutet in 2020 to focus on translational research in his group.

Over the years Dr Helleday has received numerous international awards and prizes such as; the Eppendorf-Nature Young European Investigator Award 2005 and the European Environmental Mutagen Society Young Scientist Award 2005, the BACR – AstraZeneca Young Scientist Frank Rose Award 2006, the Hilda and Alfred Eriksson’s prize 2007, the European Association for Cancer Research Young Cancer Researchers Award 2007, the Swiss Bridge Award 2008, the Svedberg Award 2008, Carcinogenesis Young Investigator Award 2010, ERC Advanced Grant Awards (2010, 2016), Göran Gustafsson Prize in Medicine 2013, Erik K Fernström Prize in Medicine 2014, Swedish Cancer researcher of the year 2016.