Professor Lyle Palmer is the Executive Director of Health Studies at the Ontario Institute of Cancer Research (OICR) in Toronto. Previously he was the Foundation Chair in Genetic Epidemiology at the University of Western Australia and in this capacity he set up the Laboratory for Genetic Epidemiology at the Western Australian Institute for Medical Research.

His PhD thesis on the genetics of asthma received nine international and national awards and in 1999 and 2000 he was both a Fulbright Fellow and a Churchill Fellow at Case Western Reserve and Harvard Universities in the United States.

Before returning to WA in 2003, he was an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of statistical genomics at Channing Laboratory in Boston. He has spoken at more than 30 international scientific meetings, delivered more than 60 invited lectures and produced more than 120 research papers.