Professor Desai developed his career as a clinician/researcher by effectively translating our understanding of cancer biology into highly impactful early-phase clinical trials, for which he is uniquely skilled and internationally recognised. Beyond his personal ambition, he has been particularly successful in finding creative mechanisms to develop, fund, lead and sustain collaborative programs locally/nationally and internationally. Critical to this has been his ability to set the research agenda through leveraging his broader leadership in early-phase trials, and incorporating genomics technologies/Precision-Medicine to further support these efforts in the cancers he focuses on as a Medical Oncologist (sarcomas/colorectal cancer).