Professor Pharoah qualified in Medicine from the University of Oxford in 1986. After a series of posts in internal medicine he worked for a year in Malawi on a leprosy vaccine trial. Then he completed his training in public health medicine before taking up a post as research fellow in the CRC Human Cancer Genetics group at the University of Cambridge in 1996. Having completed his doctoral studies in 1999 he won a Cancer Research UK Senior Clinical Research Fellowship. In 2004 his fellowship was renewed and he was successful in obtaining programme grant funding. On completion of his fellowship in 2009 he was appointed Reader in Cancer Epidemiology and then promoted to a personal Chair in 2012.