Dr Sean Lawler is a translational brain tumour scientist from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School. He earned his doctorate from Birkbeck College, University of London in 1992 and worked on the fundamentals of signal transduction in San Francisco, Paris, Dundee and at Massachusetts General Hospital until 2004 when he joined the faculty at The Ohio State University. A stint in his hometown at the University of Leeds was followed by him joining the faculty of Harvard Medical School in 2013 where he now holds the position of Associate Professor in the Department of Neurosurgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. His work has focused on brain tumours with an emphasis on glioblastoma, and the use of immunotherapeutics to treat cancer. He is an Editorial Board Member of Neurooncology, a member of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, Society for Neurooncology and American Association for Cancer Research, and in 2017 he received the prestigious BWH Innovator Award.