Lindsay Morton Appointed Director of Radiation Epidemiology Branch
, by Jennifer K. Loukissas, M.P.P.
Lindsay Morton, Ph.D., senior investigator in the Radiation Epidemiology Branch (REB), was appointed Branch Director in November 2022. Dr. Morton is an international expert on cancer risks among individuals exposed to ionizing radiation, mechanisms of radiation carcinogenesis, and etiology and outcomes of hematologic malignancies.
She leads an interdisciplinary research program examining risk factors for subsequent malignant neoplasms in cancer survivors, including large-scale genomic studies to identify germline genetic susceptibility to treatment-related subsequent neoplasms in childhood cancer survivors as well as quantifying radiation- and chemotherapy-related cancer risks. Dr. Morton is widely recognized for her leadership in integrating state-of-the-art diagnostic approaches into epidemiologic research on non-Hodgkin lymphoma, defining how the clinical and biologic heterogeneity among lymphoma subtypes corresponds to differences in etiology. Recently, she helped lead a landmark study evaluating the genomic characteristics of thyroid tumors that developed in individuals exposed to fallout following the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident.
Dr. Morton joined DCEG in 2004 as a postdoctoral fellow and was promoted to tenure-track investigator in 2008. In 2015, she was awarded scientific tenure by NIH for her superb research. She was appointed as Deputy Branch Director in 2020 and head of the Cancer Survivorship Research Unit in 2021. She has served as Acting Director of REB since September 2022.