Dr Gary Clifford was born in the UK in 1973, and has been working in the field of cancer epidemiology for twenty years. He obtained his PhD at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in the UK. Dr Clifford first came to the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), Lyon, France, as a Postdoctoral Fellow, in the Infections and Cancer Epidemiology (ICE) group. In the intervening years he worked as senior cancer epidemiologist, and is now become Head of the ICE group.

Whilst at IARC, Dr Clifford has been involved in a broad range of international epidemiological studies on infectious agents and cancer, most notably concerning HPV and HIV. Dr Clifford is the author or co-author of over 140 publications in peer-reviewed journals.