Dr Pritchard completed her PhD in 2005, focused on the genetics of Alzheimer’s Disease and related phenotypes, at the University of Birmingham, UK. She moved to QIMR, Brisbane, Australia in 2006, to continue working on the genetics of Alzheimer’s Disease with Dr Corinne Lendon. After a further productive post-doctoral position working on the immune response to respiratory viruses, Dr Pritchard took the opportunity to combine her genetics and immunology skills in Prof. Nicholas Hayward’s Melanoma Oncogenomics group at QIMR Berghofer in 2012. Her projects included the genetics of familial melanoma, the genomics of melanomas and immunological response to melanoma. It was under Prof. Hayward’s mentorship, Dr Pritchard found her research calling and has worked in these project areas since then.

In 2017, Dr Pritchard took up a tenured research position in Scotland, at the University of the Highlands and Islands, where she leads a melanoma research group in the Department of Genetics and Immunology. Dr Pritchard’s has been involved in research that led to the identification of variants in the genes POT1 and ACD as predisposition factors for familial melanoma, that changes to genes involved in pigmentation (TYR, TYRP1 and OCA2) can increase the risk to developing a melanoma. Dr Pritchard is also a member of the Australia Melanoma Genome Project, which has been at the forefront of identifying genomic changes in melanomas that drive tumour formation and progression.

Dr Pritchard is leading the familial genetics study in MyMelanoma

More information about Dr Pritchard’s research can be found here https://pure.uhi.ac.uk/en/persons/antonia-pritchard