Cristian is an Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins University with appointments in the Division of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, Department of Oncology (Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center) and the Department of Biostatistics (Bloomberg School of Public Health).
Dr. Tomasetti’s work is recognized internationally for his paradigm-shift contributions to the current understanding of cancer etiology and tumor evolution. As an applied mathematician, he also leads the effort to develop classification algorithms for the early detection of cancer, and its risk prediction, using a combination of mathematical modeling and machine learning. Dr. Tomasetti holds a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Maryland, College Park (Dec. 2010). He was then a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Biostatistics of the Harvard School of Public Health and in the Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (Jan. 2011 – Jun. 2013). Since then he has been a faculty member at Hopkins (Assistant Professor, Jul. 2013 – Dec. 2017).
Abstract
Which roles environmental exposures, hereditary factors, and background mutations play in cancer causation is one of the fundamental questions in cancer research. Recent results on cancer etiology and novel findings on mutational signatures will be presented. The second part of the talk will focus on describing methodologies for the early detection of cancer (CancerSEEK, PapSEEK, and UroSEEK), and their current developments.