David Thomas is a National Health and Medical Research Council L3 Investigator and laboratory head at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, as well as CEO of Omico, Australia's Genomic Cancer Medicine Centre. He received basic training in medicine (1982-88) and PhD (1992-95) at the University of Melbourne, and his Fellowship in Medical Oncology from the Royal Australasian College of Physicians in 1997. He undertook post-doctoral studies at Harvard Medical School (1998-2000), returning to Australia to set up his lab at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre (2004-14). He was Director of the Kinghorn Cancer Centre (2014-21) and Head of the Cancer Division of the Garvan (2014-20).

Dr Thomas’ work has focused the application of genomics to cancer care. Dr Thomas founded and leads the International Sarcoma Kindred Study, the largest ever conducted study of genetic factors in sarcoma, now recruiting from 23 centres in the 7 countries. He led the first international study of denosumab in Giant Cell Tumor of bone, leading to FDA, EMA and TGA approval of this agent for the management of this disorder. He co-led a meta-analysis of whole-body MRI screening for patients with Li-Fraumeni syndrome, changing clinical practice guidelines from the NCCN, AACR and EviQ in Australia.  He is the CEO of Omico, a Federally funded national precision oncology platform which focuses on using genomics to develop biomarker-dependent clinical trials infrastructure, and genetically stratified risk management. Omico has enabled more than 9,000 Australians with advanced rare cancers to access genomic profiling and matched targeted therapies.

He has published over 250 papers, including first or last author papers in Science, Cancer Cell, Molecular Cell, JAMA Oncology, Lancet Oncology, Journal of Clinical Oncology, Cancer Discovery, Journal of Clinical Investigation and Nature Communications. In 2018, he became President of the peak body in his field, the Connective Tissue Oncology Society.