Amy Berrington de González

Amy Berrington de González is a scientist and Professor of Clinical Epidemiology at the Institute of Cancer Research in London.

Education
Berrington de González received a D.Phil. in Cancer Epidemiology from the University of Oxford. Her 2001 dissertation was titled Epidemiological evidence for the risk of cancer from diagnostic X-rays. Her university supervisors were Sarah Darby and David Cox.

Career
Berrington de González was on the faculty at the University of Oxford and then Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health before moving to the Radiation Epidemiology Branch at NCI in 2008. She was awarded NIH scientific tenure in 2012, and was promoted to Branch Chief in 2014. In 2022, she took up the position of Professor of Clinical Epidemiology at the in London, UK. Prof Berrington de González serves on two radiation risk committees for the National Academy of Science and previously served on the UK Health Protection Agency's Advisory Group on Ionising Radiation, and the UK Breast Screening Programme's Advisory Group. Berrington de González is currently Vice Chair of the NAS Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board and has participated in many national and international radiation committees. She served on the editorial board for the American Journal of Epidemiology.

Prof Berrington de González is co-PI of the UK Pediatric CT scans cohort, which was the first epidemiological study to suggest a direct link between CT scans and subsequent cancer risk. She also leads studies on the risk of second cancer after proton therapy and other emerging radiotherapy techniques.

Research
The overarching goal of Prof Berrington's research is to quantify the potential cancer risks from this important source of radiation exposure in order to provide information for public health and clinical purposes. Her interdisciplinary training in epidemiology and biostatistics allow her to pursue this goal using both theoretical risk projection modeling and also by conducting epidemiological studies of medically exposed populations. The studies vary across the dose-spectrum from low-dose diagnostic and screening procedures to high-dose radiotherapy, with distinct opportunities and challenges in each area.

Diagnostic and screening tests
Berrington de González has conducted a series of risk projection studies to estimate the potential cancer risks from both diagnostic and screening examinations, including: cardiac stress tests, CT colonography and lung CT screening. To perform these studies she and other collaborators developed the NCI Radiation Risk Assessment Tool (RadRAT), which is interactive computer software that uses state of the art risk projection models to estimate lifetime cancer risks and incorporates Monte Carlo simulation methods to assess the impact of uncertainties in the assumptions and data. She recently became the NCI Principal Investigator for the UK Pediatric CT scans study, which is a retrospective cohort study of 250,000 children who had one or more CT scans as children or adolescents.

Therapeutic radiation exposure
Berrington de González has conducted a number of studies using the SEER cancer registries to evaluate patterns of second cancers and the second cancer risks related to radiotherapy treatment. She is currently developing a cohort of breast cancer survivors using the electronic medical records from Kaiser Permanente Health Plans to study the late effects of various breast cancer treatments. She is also developing methods to project risks from high-doses of radiation exposure and conducting a pilot study to assess the feasibility of performing the first multi-center study of the second cancer risks from proton therapy and IMRT.

Awards and honors
Prof Berrington is an elected member of the American Epidemiological Society.