Cancer Risk Prediction, Early Detection and Minimal Residual Disease [Video]

Cristian Tomasetti, Ph.D.
Director, Center for Cancer Prevention and Early Detection, City of Hope
Professor and Director, Division of Mathematics for Cancer Evolution and Early Detection, Department of Computational & Quantitative Medicine, City of Hope

Cristian Tomasetti, Ph.D., is director of the Center for Cancer Prevention and Early Detection at City of Hope, director of the Division of Mathematics for Cancer Evolution and Early Detection in the Department of Computational and Quantitative Medicine at Beckman Research Institute of City of Hope, and professor and director of the Division of Integrated Cancer Genomics at Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen).

Dr. Tomasetti is recognized internationally for his paradigm-shift contributions to the current understanding of cancer etiology and tumor evolution. By combining mathematical modeling, statistical analysis, and machine learning with experimental, epidemiological and DNA sequencing data, he has provided the first quantitative evidence for the significant role in cancer causation played by the normal, e.g., endogenous, accumulation of somatic mutations in the cells of the human body. As an applied mathematician, he currently leads the effort to develop novel blood tests and classification artificial intelligence algorithms for the early detection of cancer and monitoring of cancer patients.

Before joining City of Hope and TGen, he was an associate professor of Oncology and Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University with appointments in the Division of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, in both the Department of Oncology (Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center) and the Department of Biostatistics (Bloomberg School of Public Health). Dr. Tomasetti holds a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of Maryland, College Park (December 2010). After his Ph.D., he was a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health and the Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (January 2011 through June 2013), after which he became a faculty member at Hopkins (assistant professor, July 2013 through December 2017).

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