Megan Hitchins completed her Ph.D in clinical and molecular genetics at the Institute of Child Health, University College London in 1999, followed by post-doctoral positions at Imperial College London and the Institute of Child Health on the role of genomic imprinting in congenital diseases until 2004.
She relocated to Sydney, Australia and her first faculty position at the University of New South Wales (2005-2012), where her research on constitutional MLH1 epimutation in cancer predisposition was career-defining. She published lead-author papers in high-impact journals (including New England Journal of Medicine, Nature Genetics, Cancer Cell, and Gastroenterology), and was funded by career development awards and project grants from the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council, the Cancer Institute NSW, and Cancer Council NSW.
In 2013 she was recruited to the USA, first to Stanford University in California as Associate Professor, then to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in 2017 where she was promoted to Professor, and recently to the Moffitt Cancer Center in Florida. In the USA, she has continued her research on constitutional MLH1 epimutation funded by the NIH / National Cancer Institute (NCI), as well as other genetic-epigenetic interactions as cancer risk factors, with publications in other high-impact journals (including JNCCN, Clinical Cancer Research, Nature Cancer Reviews).
In other translational research funded by the NCI/NIH and the Colorectal Cancer Alliance, she has developed panels of methylation-based circulating tumor DNA markers for the early detection and post-diagnostic monitoring of colorectal cancer. Megan has supervised and mentored a number of post-graduate students, post-docs, clinical scholars, and junior faculty in their research projects, grant successes, and career development.
