Fergus Couch is the Zbigniew and Anna M. Scheller Professor of Medical Research and Chair of the Division of Experimental Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Mayo Clinic. Dr. Couch has over 650 publications with a D-index of 123 relating primarily to the clinical characterization of inherited genetic variants in cancer susceptibility genes. He is the director of the Mayo Clinic Breast Cancer Registry and a founder and contributor to the CIMBA and BCAC consortia that have identified common genetic variants associated with breast cancer risk and developed polygenic risk scores for breast cancer risk assessment. He is the founder of the CARRIERS study that established population-based risks of breast cancer for variants in cancer predisposition genes. He is also a co-founder of the ENIGMA consortium and has focused on the use of functional studies for classification of variants of uncertain significance (VUS) in cancer predisposition genes. He is also the chairperson of the NIH/ClinGen Hereditary Breast, Ovarian and Pancreatic (HBOP) cancer variant curation expert panel (VCEP) for cancer predisposition genes. He holds several grants, including an R35 outstanding investigator award from the National Cancer Institute, and has received a number of awards in recognition of his work including the Mayo Clinic Distinguished Investigator Award, the AACR Outstanding Investigator  Award for Breast Cancer Research, and the Basser Global Prize.