Canfell, Karen
Former Board Member - Co-Chair IPVC 2018
Director, Cancer Research Division Adjunct Professor, University of Sydney, School of Public Health | Conjoint Professor, UNSW Australia, Prince of Wales Clinical School
Cancer Council NSW
Adjunct Professor, University of Sydney, School of Public Health | Conjoint Professor, UNSW Australia, Prince of Wales Clinical School
153 Dowling St, Woolloomooloo NSW 2011 Australia
T: +61 2 9334 1726 | M: +61 404 517 786
Professor Karen Canfell is Director of the Cancer Research Division at Cancer Council NSW and Adjunct Professor at Sydney Medical School, University of Sydney. She holds a D.Phil. (PhD equivalent) in Epidemiology from the University of Oxford.
Her work involves the evaluation and translation of new strategies for cancer screening. A focus has been the interplay between HPV vaccination and cervical screening in both high and low resource countries. She has led economic evaluations of new cervical screening approaches for government agencies in Australia, New Zealand and England and she is a co-PI for a current National Cancer Institute (NCI) USA collaborative grant, CISNET-Cervical, which is evaluating options for cervical cancer prevention in the USA. Her group’s work also underpins the current Renewal (review) of the National Cervical Screening Program in Australia – based on this body of work, in December 2017 the National Cervical Screening Program will transition from 2-yearly cytology screening (Pap smears) to 5-yearly HPV DNA testing. In collaboration with the Victorian Cytology Service, she initiated Compass, Australian’s largest clinical trial, which is providing a sentinel experience of the new cervical screening program and is the first trial internationally to assess cervical screening in an HPV-vaccinated population.
With collaborators, Prof. Canfell is now working on other questions in cancer screening. In addition to work on new approaches to breast screening, she has active projects to quantify the benefits, harms and cost-effectiveness of the National Bowel Cancer Screening Program, to evaluate screening for Lynch Syndrome, and to assess potential new strategies for PSA testing and lung cancer screening.
In 2015, Karen received the National Research Excellence Award for the highest-ranked Career Development Fellowship in Population Health and was nominated as one of ‘100 Women of Influence’ in the Westpac/Australian Financial Review national awards.
