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Torsten Nielsen

I am a clinician-scientist in the UBC Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and an affiliated member of the Department of Orthopaedics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, holding the academic rank of full professor. I am based at Vancouver General Hospital and at BC Cancer, working out of the Division of Anatomical Pathology and our Molecular and Advanced Pathology Core.

In 2018 I become the Director of UBC's combined MD/PhD program, where I am responsible for policy development, recruitment efforts and for mentoring our group of stellar students. I contribute to the correlative sciences planning around cancer clinical trials for the Canadian Cancer Trials Group and I am the founder and co-chair of the International Rare Cancers Initiative group developing clinical trials for synovial sarcoma as well as a board member of the Connective Tissue Oncology Society.

25% of my time is devoted to clinical work: musculoskeletal pathology including diagnosis of connective tissue neoplasms in the province of British Columbia, weekly sarcoma treatment planning conferences, and teaching residents and medical students at UBC. The balance of my time is devoted to supervising in their translational research projects studying how molecular changes in cancer cells impact upon diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment response, and in developing new and clinically-practical molecular diagnostics and targeted therapies for human cancer (with a focus on breast cancer and sarcomas).