Hunter's principal career research interests are the aetiology of various cancers, particularly breast, colorectal, and skin cancers, and prostate cancer in men. He was an investigator on the Nurses' Health Study, a long-running cohort of 121,000 U.S. women, and was project director for the Nurses’ Health Study II, a cohort of 116,000 women followed since 1989. His focus is on genetic susceptibility to these cancers, and gene-environment interactions. This work was originally based in subcohorts of the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study of approximately 33,000 women and 18,000 men who have given a blood sample that can be used for DNA analysis.
Cancer Consortia
Until 2012, Hunter was co-chair of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Breast and Prostate Cancer Cohort Consortium and co-director of the NCI Cancer Genetic Markers of Susceptibility (CGEMS) Special Initiative. These projects are large collaborative consortia in order to obtain the necessarily large sample sizes and to assess consistency of results across studies.
HIV research and global health
In the 1980s and 1990s, he collaborated with investigators in Kenya and Tanzania on early studies of HIV transmission, and subsequently he collaborated on studies of nutritional aspects of AIDS progression as they relate to child survival in affected populations. He co-edited a series of articles on global health which were published in the New England Journal of Medicine, for which he also serves as a statistical editor.
University of Oxford
In 2017, Hunter moved to the University of Oxford as the Richard Doll Professor of Epidemiology and Medicine in the Nuffield Department of Population Health, and as a Governing Board Fellow of Green Templeton College. He directs a Unit focused on translating disease risk information into population health and clinical practice.
As of 2023[update] he is Chief Science Advisor to Our Future Health a major initiative of the UK Government.[4] In 2021, he was elected as a Fellow by distinction of the UK Faculty of Public Health, and elected as a Fellow of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences.