Chief Executive and Executive Board

Michelle Mitchell OBE
Chief Executive Officer

Michelle Mitchell OBE joined in November 2018. She is responsible for the overall leadership and management of CRUK, the world’s leading cancer charity, dedicated to saving and improving lives with its research.

Since taking the helm, Michelle has helped put CRUK on a strong footing to achieve its vision of bringing about a world where everybody lives longer, better lives, free from the fear of cancer. Having navigated the COVID-19 pandemic, she set the organisation on an ambitious new course with the launch of its long-term strategy in 2022. In the three years since, Michelle has led the charity in delivering some of the strongest impact and financial performances in its history.

Michelle is a senior voluntary sector leader who has transformed a number of not-for-profit organisations to better their purpose and global impact. She has a successful track record of delivering long term value, collaboration and innovation.

She is a trustee of The Francis Crick Institute and member of the General Advisory Council for The King’s Fund.

Before joining Cancer Research UK, Michelle was CEO of the MS Society for five years and a founding member of the Progressive MS Alliance: a global scientific and research joint venture and launched the STOP MS £100m appeal. Prior to that, she was Director General at Age UK, the UK’s largest older people’s charity where she worked for nearly a decade and was at the forefront of national debates on health, care and welfare.

Michelle has extensive non-executive experience, which has included NED at NHS England. She contributes to steering groups for the Department for Health and Social Care’s National Cancer Plan and 10-Year Health Plan for England. Michelle has a BA in Economics, an MA in Politics and Public Administration and an International Executive Diploma from INSEAD. She is an Honorary Fellow of the University of Cambridge’s Homerton College.

Michelle was awarded an OBE in 2015 for services to the charity sector.

 

Angela Morrison
Chief Operating Officer

Angela joined Cancer Research UK in April 2021 as Chief Operating Officer and leads the Charity's finance, people, technology, general council and change teams, working across our organisation to ensure we have appropriate governance and an operating model that enables us to be as effective and efficient as we can at delivering on our mission to beat cancer.

Angela is also a Non Executive Board Member of HM Land Registry, where she sits on the Audit and Change Committees alongside providing support to the operations, transformation and technology teams.

Angela has extensive experience as a commercial executive, most recently at Debenhams where she led their retail, supply chain and technology teams and prior to that Direct Line Group, Sainsburys and Asda/Walmart. In these organisations she led and managed both technical and business change, and as part of the broader executive led the organisations through their cultural transformations.

She was the executive sponsor for Corporate Social Responsibility at both Debenhams and Direct Line and for a number of years sat on the Advisory Board for The Tech Partnership (previously E-skills), working with peers and counterparts in the information technology (IT) service sector to improve IT skills in education and the workplace.

Angela has a degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Bristol.

 

Philip Almond
Executive Director, Marketing, Fundraising and Engagement

Phil joined Cancer Research UK in December 2019 and leads the Charity's Fundraising and Marketing teams, working with our supporters, donors and staff to raise the funds which will help us beat cancer sooner.

Prior to joining CRUK he was Chief Marketing Officer at the BBC and before that had a long career at Diageo, where among other roles he led the company's UK consumer and customer marketing teams, and the Baileys and Smirnoff brands globally.

Phil and his team are responsible for the brand, communications and revenue generation to allow the Charity to meet its ambitious goals.

Phil has a Masters in English from the University of Cambridge and an MBA from the London Business School.

 

Iain Foulkes PhD
Cancer Research UK Executive Director of Research & Innovation & CEO of Cancer Research Horizons

Iain was appointed to the CRUK board in August 2009. He oversees CRUK's portfolio of research across discovery science, translational research, clinical and population research. This research portfolio includes the international Cancer Grand Challenge programme, a large clinical trial portfolio and oversight of CRUK’s Institutes and Centres.

As CEO of Cancer Research Horizons, he is also responsible for ensuring research outputs are developed and commercialised, often in partnership with biotech and pharmaceutical companies to ensure rapid and effective patient impact.

Iain is a member of the Scotland Institute Board and is a Non-Executive Director at the British Medical Journal.

 

Nick Grant
Executive Director, Strategy and Philanthropy

Nick is the Executive Director of Strategy and Philanthropy at Cancer Research UK, where he is responsible for developing the organisation’s long-term strategy and leads the Philanthropy directorate – a strategic growth priority for the charity.

Nick has been a member of the Executive Board since 2015, and has also held roles as Executive Director, International Partnerships; Interim Executive Director of Policy and Information, and as Director of Strategy.

Prior to Cancer Research UK, Nick spent 10 years as a management consultant at The Boston Consulting Group, Braxton Associates and Deloitte. He has a Masters in Manufacturing Engineering from the University of Cambridge, and an MBA from INSEAD business school.

Nick is a Trustee of the Epilepsy Society and former Board Member of the Union for International Cancer Control.

 

Dr Ian Walker Bsc, PhD, MBA
Executive Director for Policy, Information and Communications

Ian was appointed to the Board in 2021 and is responsible for developing and implementing CRUK’s strategic priorities across policy, information and communications.

Ian brings a wealth of leadership experience to the board, and has lead on a range of the charity’s key campaigns to inform government policy around cancer research and improving cancer outcomes, including; the push for the protection and restoration of clinical research activity within the NHS during the COVID-19 pandemic and the introduction of the world-leading Tobacco and Vapes Bill.

Over the last 20 years Ian has held high impact roles in a range of settings; including commercial, research, policy and strategic communications.

Ian is a trustee for The Pirbright Institute and is a member of the Institute Gustave Roussy Scientific Council. He has held a range of non-executive roles across biotech, health and third sectors.

Ian holds a Biochemistry BSc with honours and a PhD from the University of Leeds. He also holds an MBA with distinction from Warwick Business School. Alongside this, he has undertaken executive education in Digital Transformation at Harvard Medical School and Artificial Intelligence at Imperial College Business School.

 

Adrian Walsh
Finance Director

Adrian joined Cancer Research UK in March 2024 as Interim Finance Director with responsibility of CRUK's Finance, Procurement and Property teams ensuring that these key support teams help the organisation to make the right decisions, remain compliant and operate efficiently to help deliver the mission to beat cancer.

Adrian is a Chartered Accountant, qualifying with Touche Ross in 1993. He has extensive commercial experience gained in senior finance roles at Safeway, Gap, Worldpay, Costa Coffee and Currys. In recent years he has worked as an interim CFO (on short term assignments) at G4S, where he helped the UK&I security solutions business navigate the Covid period, and at P&O Ferries where he led the finance team in a time of transformation.

He has a degree in Financial Management and Economics from the University of Sheffield.

 

Clinical and Scientific Advisors

Professor Ketan (KJ) Patel PhD FRS FMedSci MRCP

Professor Patel was appointed as CRUK’s Chief Scientist in October 2022. He provides scientific leadership to the charity’s ambitions, working with our research community to deliver our research strategy which focuses on the importance of discovery science to unlock new and better ways to beat cancer.

He is Director of the MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine and the MRC Molecular Haematology Unit at the University of Oxford. Prior to this, he was a tenured principal investigator at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, and Professor for molecular medicine and stem cell genomics at the University of Cambridge.

Professor Patel trained in medicine in London, and his postdoctoral research led to the discovery that BRCA2 works by repairing damaged DNA.

His subsequent work has remained focussed on DNA damage, and specifically on how living cells repair DNA crosslinks. These crosslinks can be exploited to kill cancer cells, for example the drug cisplatin causes crosslinking in cancer cells, but they can also occur naturally. Specific defects in the molecular machinery that repairs DNA crosslinking is associated with the illness Fanconi anaemia. KJ’s recent work has shown that metabolism releases aldehydes that are a potent source of such endogenous DNA damage.

Cancer Research UK has funded Professor Patel’s work in the past, including his research into cancer cachexia, the debilitating wasting condition many people with cancer experience in the later stages of their disease, which we still don’t fully understand. His findings have also contributed to the organisation's improved understanding of what drives the development of cancer, such as how alcohol exposure can cause cancer, opening up new opportunities for prevention, detection and treatment. 

Professor Patel is a Fellow of both the Royal Society and Academy of Medical Sciences UK and is also a member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation. 

 

Professor Charles Swanton MBPhD FRCP FMedSci FRS

Charles was appointed Chief Clinician for Cancer Research UK in October 2017. He has responsibility for the strategy and shape of the Charity's clinical activities, both in clinical research and in the wider context of cancer prevention, diagnosis, and treatment.

Charles completed his MBPhD in 1999 at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratories and Cancer Research UK clinician/scientist medical oncology training in 2008.  He combines his laboratory research at the Francis Crick Institute and University College London Cancer Institute with clinical duties at UCLH and as director of the CRUK Lung Cancer Centre, focussed on how tumours evolve over space and time. Charles has demonstrated ubiquitous cancer branched evolution, how it is shaped by genome instability, therapy and immunity, and how this can be exploited for therapy, demonstrating how inflammation drives cancer initiation. 

Charles was made Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in April 2011, appointed Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2015, Napier Professor in Cancer by the Royal Society in 2016, appointed Cancer Research UK’s Chief Clinician in 2017, and elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2018.

Charles was awarded the Stand up to Cancer Translational Cancer Research Prize (2015), Glaxo Smithkline Biochemical Society Prize (2016), San Salvatore prize for Cancer Research (2017), the Ellison-Cliffe Medal, Royal Society of Medicine (2017), recipient of the Gordon Hamilton Fairley Medal (2018), the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Centre Kraft Prize for Excellence in Cancer Research (2018), the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) Paul A. Bunn Scientific Award for achievements in lung cancer (2018), the ESMO Translation Award (2019), the Weizmann Institute Sergio Lombroso Award in Cancer Research (2021), the Memorial Sloan Kettering Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research (2021), UCLH Celebrating Excelence Award for Contribution to World Class Research (2022), Inductee to OncLive’s Giants of Cancer Care award (2023), and the SpringerNature CDD Award (2023).