Paul A. Northcott PhD, MSc

Dr. Paul Northcott is a Faculty, Associate Member at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital - ALSAC. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, Dr. Paul Northcott completed his postdoctoral training at the Hospital for Sick Children in Ontario, Canada, and the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, Germany. His prolific and impactful work as a trainee led to a faculty appointment in 2015 at St. Jude, where he continues to shape our understanding of the genomic landscape of pediatric medulloblastoma. In addition to authoring more than 150 peer-reviewed publications, Dr. Northcott is the recipient of several prestigious accolades including the Pew-Stewart Scholar for Cancer Research Award, Sontag Foundation Distinguished Scholar Award, AACR NextGen Grant for Transformative Research, and the St. Baldrick’s Robert J. Arceci Innovation Award.

Paul A. Northcott's research focuses on medulloblastoma, a highly aggressive form of brain cancer in children. In many cancers, including medulloblastoma, patients succumb not to the primary tumor, but to recurrent disease that comes back after initial treatment. He will be using techniques in genome sequencing to compare differences in genetic alterations in tumors from medulloblastoma patients prior to treatment and after treatment relapse. Already, He has collected 50 "newly diagnosed" and "relapsed" tumor pairs from medulloblastoma patients enrolled in clinical trials at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. He will compare the "before treatment" with "after treatment" tumor samples to detect differences in gene expression, gene mutations, and also gene fusions, deletions, and duplications. Further, He will study the genetic alterations discovered through these analyses to generate new mouse models of medulloblastoma—work that will ultimately provide additional direction for treating children with this form of recurrent brain cancer.