Professor Ashok Venkitaraman is the Zoellner Professor of Cancer Research at the Cambridge Institute of Medical Research, University of Cambridge. He has made significant contributions in the field of immunology and DNA repair. His work started in Michael Neuberger’s lab where he studied the process of V(D)J recombination in the creation of antibody. He then turned his attention to the mechanism by which signalling through the IL7 receptor promotes immunoglobulin rearrangement, and showed that the signal works by modifying the accessibility of immunoglobulin gene loci to the recombinase complex that cleaves and repairs DNA. He has translated his expertise on the repair of double strength DNA to the problem of cancer in which faulty DNA recombination is likely to be an important mechanism. He has shown that the breast cancer 2 gene is indeed involved in double-strand DNA repair and that the resulting unrepaired DNA damage causes activation of mitotic cell cycle checkpoints.