Francine Durocher

Biography

Francine Durocher is a Full Professor at the Department of Molecular Medicine, Laval University, since 2010. Dr Francine Durocher obtained her PhD at Laval University in 1996. After the completion of her thesis on BRCA1, she did a first postdoctoral fellow in molecular genetics at the Hospital for Sick Children, in Toronto, and then completed a second postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge, England, in genetic epidemiology and statistics. She was the first Canadian to receive the Hitchings-Elion Fellowship from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund US. After the completion of her second postdoc, she started her career at Laval University in 2001, holding a Research Career Award from the Health Research Fundation or CIHR. She was the leader of a principal component of the INHERIT BRCAs CIHR Team grant program from 2001-2006, and is now a major co-investigator in the CIHR Team on Familial Risks of Breast Cancer. She has received major operating grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research CIHR and the Canadian Breast Cancer Research Alliance CBCRA as well as from the Canadian Cancer society Research Institute CCSRI. Her main research program aims at identifying novel breast cancer susceptibility loci/genes and is addressed to high-risk breast cancer families in which no mutation in either of the two main susceptibility genes, namely BRCA1 or BRCA2, has been identified. Dr Durocher is also involved in numerous international consortia, the objectives of which are aiming to identify uncommon or rare intermediate-risk genetic variants and determine their relative contribution to the familial relative risk of breast cancer.

Research Interest

Her main research program aims at identifying novel breast cancer susceptibility loci or genes and is addressed to high-risk breast cancer families in which no mutation in either of the two main susceptibility genes namely BRCA1 or BRCA2 has been identified. Dr Durocher is also involved in numerous international consortia, the objectives of which are aiming to identify uncommon or rare intermediate-risk genetic variants and determine their relative contribution to the familial relative risk of breast cancer.