Gian-Paolo Dotto is director of the Laboratory of Skin Aging and Cancer Prevention, in the Dermatology Department at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, director of the Personalised Cancer Prevention Program, University Hospital (CHUV) in Lausanne (CH) and President of the international Cancer Prevention Institute (iCPI).  

He is an elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (2011), the Academia Europaea (2012), the Leopoldina German National Academy of Sciences (2014) and an Overseas Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine (2018). He is the recipient of a number of awards, including the American Skin Association Achievement Award (2012), an ERC Advanced investigator grant award (2013) the Jurg Tschopp Award for Excellence in Biological Sciences (2015) and the Life Time Achievement Award from the University of Lausanne, School of Medicine and Biology (2020). He has been a contributor for the Osservatore Romano, the official newspaper of the Holy See, as well as the Science and Society section of EMBO Reports.  

His group has been studying early steps of cancer development and the genetic and epigenetic basis of cancer susceptibility in the context of ancestry and sex differences.  They have opened major new perspectives on the interplay between developmental and transcription/epigenetic pathways involved in control of tissue homeostasis and carcinogenesis, with skin as a model of major clinical significance.