Events

Tuesday, April 23, 2019 1:00-1:30 PM: Refreshments in 200 Mudd 1:30-2:30 PM Lecture in 750 CEPSR “Adventures in modeling cancer evolution” Simon Tavaré Director, Irving Institute for Cancer Dynamics Departments of Statistics and Biological Sciences Columbia University Abstract: Understanding the past and future evolution of tumors is a challenging experimental and mathematical problem. Cancer is described as a disease of the genome, so my focus will be on mutations in DNA and what they tell us about tumor evolution. I will focus on aspects of tumor heterogeneity, the DNA sequence variation observed between tumors and within them. I will outline some of the issues, illustrating the interplay between molecular data obtained from tumors and the statistical and stochastic modeling used for inference. I will conclude with a glimpse of where technology is taking us in this quest, and the sort of quantitative problems that are just around the corner.